XIVWell, as I said, something reminded Berri of that night, and as we were on a deserted road far from Cambridge, he referred to it,—indirectly at first, and afterwards right out in so many words. But he didn't talk in the same free and airy strain he had been talking in before, and although I wanted to hear what he said and ask questions and say a few things myself, I had a feeling all the time that perhaps we ought to change the subject; it made me uncomfortable. Then I thought of the way I had talked to Duggie the first evening, away back in September, and positively blushed when I remembered that I had asked him, outright, how one ought to go about getting on clubs. Why, that was enough to sewer me with almost anybody in the world but Duggie. Imagine my doing such a thing now! No one ever thinks of mentioning the clubs in general conversation. Of course once in a while some fresh kid who happens to live next door to one of them comes out with an allusion of some kind, and embarrasses everybody to death; and I 've had one or two upper classmen—Juniors or Seniors—who hadn't made the Dickey and didn't belong to a club talk to me quite freely about the whole matter in a tone that implied that such things were all very well, no doubt, but did n't interest them particularly. You can get a good deal of information from upper classmen of this kind,—fellows who are n't on clubs and have given up expecting to be; they don't think you fresh. But it would never do to ask for any from a Dickey man; that would be awful. Why, you 'd never be taken on if you did that.Even Berri does n't seem to know much about the Dickey, or, if he does, he did n't tell me anything very definite. He said, though, that if you didn't make it, you might just as well pack up and go home; that Dickey men kind of flocked together and did n't go outside much for their friends, and that the fellows you wanted to know usually were on the Dickey. Then, too, he said that if a man did n't make the Dickey, he wasn't likely to be taken into a club. Berri seemed to know a lot about the clubs. I knew hardly anything at all; in fact, I thought the Dickey was a club, but he says it isn't,—that it's a society. The clubs, he says, are great. His uncle took him to one for breakfast once before he—Berri—got into college. (Of course he couldn't be taken to one now.) He said he did n't notice anything particularly secret about it; it was just like one of the good clubs in town. I found out the names of most of them from him—they seem to have Greek names, yet are called by queer nicknames as a rule—and where they are. This last, however, I knew pretty well before, but I did n't know which was which, and could n't ask exactly. I had often seen fellows going in and out of certain houses along Mount Auburn Street that did n't look like residences somehow, although they might have been, and wondered just what they were. At night, even with the shades down, they were always lighted from top to bottom. No matter how late it was, the lights were there, cheerful and inviting,—which in itself seemed remarkable when I considered how early Cambridge (the town, I mean) goes to bed. But one morning when I was hurrying to a lecture, two fellows came out of Claverly Hall, and one of them said to the other, "Hold up a minute; I left my note-book at the club," and dashed across the street. Then it suddenly dawned on me. Of course I never look curiously at them any more, but just walk right on with my eyes fixed on something in the distance as if they were ordinary houses. I can't help wondering, sometimes, whether anybody ever noticed me staring at them and at the fellows going in and out—before I knew. I hope not.When I asked Duggie about getting into clubs that time, I remember he evaded the subject (which was darned good of him, it seems to me now) by saying something about being polite to everybody."That's all very well," Berri answered, when I laughed a little and told him about it, "but there's such a thing as being too polite. You see, there are fellows right now in our class—you know who they are and I do too—who are, even as early as this, being considered for the First Ten. If you suddenly turned in and tried to make yourself nice to them, why, everybody would say you were 'swiping;' and so you would be. The First Ten elects the Second Ten, you know.""Duggie did n't mean that you ought to be polite only to the fellows you think are going to help you along," I answered. "It was exactly the reverse of that. What he meant was that you ought to be the same to everybody.""I wonder ifhewas," Berri mused. "It's so easy, after you 've once got to the top yourself, to think you did it all with the help of the Scriptures. It's like these old vultures who 've stolen everything in sight ever since they were born, beginning their magazine articles on 'How to Get Rich' with: 'Honesty and Industry must be the motto of him who would attain wealth!'"I refused to see any connection between Duggie and the old vultures, and tried to get back to the clubs. However, we did n't say much more about them, and squabbled most of the way home over the subject of popularity. It does seem queer that some fellows have so many friends, while others who start with about the same opportunities and even greater natural advantages now and then have so few. I suggested that when a fellow was tremendously popular and "in" everything—and I could n't see why it was exactly—he probably had very interesting or fascinating qualities that I had n't perhaps discovered. Berri, however, maintained that popularity was often nothing but an idiotic fashion, and mentioned several popular fellows he did n't like, to prove it."Now look at Tucker Ludlow," he burst out. "What is he? A dissipated little beast; you know he is, everybody knows he is. Not that I should mind his being dissipated and a beast, if he were ever anything else; but he isn't. He's stupid, and he 's ignorant, and he is n't even good-looking, yet he moves in a crowd,—a nice crowd too; and when he moves, the crowd moves with him. That's nothing but fashion. It is n't possible that anybody can really like the creature. But it amounts to the same thing; I 've already heard it kind of whispered around that he 'll be on the First Ten."What Berri said interested me very much, for Ludlow and I had agreed, a few days before, to grind together on a course for the mid-year exams. I had intended to remind him of it, but now that Berri said he was spoken of for the First Ten I don't like to; people might think I was swiping. I don't care much for Ludlow myself; but he doesn't irritate me the way he does Berri, and I do think there must be something to him.After the freaks of fashion, Berri seemed to think that the most popular men—in one's Freshman year anyhow—were the fellows whose opportunities for making friends were good to begin with, and who were n't in any way particularly startling,—athletics, of course, always excepted; athletes never lack a following. But it does n't do, he says, to be different, or to excel at first in much of anything else. You may with perfect safety have the reputation for knowing things or being clever, but that 's very different from really knowing or being. The man who actually knows or is, is doomed."What about Reggie Howard, then?" I asked. Everybody likes Howard, and yet he knows a fearful amount and is as clever as any one could be. I knew Berri thought so, and wondered how he would get out of it."Yes, Reggie's wise,—very wise," he admitted, "but with the exception of you and me, almost no one suspects it. He does n't object to my knowing, because he feels sure I don't mind; and you 're safe because you 're so kind. But he takes care that people generally don't get on to it. That's part of his wisdom."One thing I 've learned here that surprised me a good deal, and that is—popularity has nothing to do with money. I always had an idea that people with money to throw to the birds could n't help being liked; but that evidently is n't the case. And Berri did n't have to tell me; I found it out for myself. Of course it's nice to be able to live in comfortable rooms and have plenty to eat and wear decent clothes. No one objects to that, and no one objects, apparently, to a fellow's doing more than that,—to spending, indeed, a good deal of money if he has it to spend. But the mere fact of a man's having a record-breaking allowance does n't seem to interest people in the least, and if some frightfully rich fellow comes to college with a flourish of trumpets in the Sunday papers about his father's income, and how many horses he intends to keep, and how much the furnishing of his rooms will probably cost, it 's decidedly against him. I was thinking, I suppose, of Tony Earle in our class. His father makes millions and millions out of safety-matches—I believe it is. Anyhow, everybody speaks of Tony as "His Matchesty," and has very little to do with him. The fellows are simply prejudiced against him because the papers said he had so much money. And he 's really a perfectly harmless, rather quiet sort of person who plays well on the piano. Berri and I spent an evening with him once. We were dining in town, and Earle was all alone across the room. He looked so dreary that Berri finally exclaimed,—"For heaven's sake, why doesn't some one take pity on that poor wretched millionaire? It's positively pathetic!"I suggested asking him to come over and have his dinner with us. But Berri, like every one else, objected."He 'd probably order nightingales or peacocks or some such thing, and then insist on paying for us," he said."Well, let's ask him and see," I urged. "We'll make that the test. If he tries to pay the whole bill, he won't do." So Berri went over and asked him to join us, and he turned out just as I said,—quiet and not especially interesting, but a good deal nicer than a lot of fellows who won't know him. When it came to paying the waiter, Berri kicked me under the table and spent an indecently long time in looking over the check. I think he was actually disappointed when Earle glanced across the table and merely said,—"By the way, what's my share?"When we got to Cambridge he asked us over to his rooms. They certainly are dreams; even Berri could n't find anything wrong with them. He bangs the box like a wizard."I was afraid he was going to say he was lonely, or something melodramatic like that, when we got up to leave and he asked us to come again," Berri remarked on the way home. "Of course he is horribly lonely, and it was very considerate of him not to spoil everything by saying so. I think we 'll have to go back. To-morrow at luncheon we can start a society for the prevention of cruelty to millionaires."Well, if I 'm ever ostracized it won't be because people are scared at my allowance. Papa and I have been having an exceedingly brisk correspondence lately. Just after the family got back to Perugia, Mildred wrote me that papa had won an important lawsuit and was going to get an unusually large fee. So I bought some clothes and a few things I really needed on the strength of it and had the bill sent home, as he made me promise to let him know just what I spent. He replied at some length, declaring, among other things, that I reminded him of what Charles Lamb says of a poor relation; Lamb's remark being, "A poor relation is a preposterous shadow lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity." I expostulated, and told him about Willie Jackson. Willie's elder brother passed through Boston not long ago, and when Willie went in to see him he asked for money with which to buy a dress-suit case and some shoes he needed badly. No one knows exactly how it happened,—some think that Willie had been brooding over the Fine Arts course he is taking and the instructor's plea for more beauty in one's every-day environment. Anyhow, when Willie stepped off the car in Cambridge, he had—not the shoes and the dress-suit case, but a palm and a canary-bird.To this papa replied that he didn't see why I had taken the trouble to record for his benefit the exploits of Willie Jackson, as he never for a moment had doubted that there were as many fools in college as elsewhere. That is where the matter rests at present.As there is nothing doing now that you can watch in the afternoon as you can the football practice in the autumn and the baseball and crews in the spring, some of us at the table have become athletes on our own account. We go to the gym every day at about five, and work with chest-weights and dumbbells, and are put through all sorts of agonizing performances in a large class of hard students who never take any other kind of exercise. Then we run up North Avenue as far as the railway-station and back to our rooms. I don't know how far it is, but the return trip at first seemed to be about a hundred miles; it's a little shorter now, and gets shorter every day. After a hot shower-bath and then a cold one you feel eight or ten feet high, and walk through the Square to dinner, sticking out your chest. It's queer you don't catch cold, running in the icy wind with literally nothing on but a pair of tennis shoes, loose short cotton drawers, and a thin sleeveless undershirt; but you never seem to. The gym made me stiff all over for a day or two, but I feel fine now, and wonder why we never thought of it before. The muckers on the Avenue bother us a good deal with snowballs when we run. Hemington very foolishly chased one of them not long ago and washed his face with snow. The paternal mucker has since sued Hemi for assault and battery. Hemi is in a great state about it, and we are all looking forward to cutting a morningful of lectures and testifying in court.The mid-years are almost here, and I feel as if it were only about the day before yesterday that I was failing in the hour exams. I simply must do well in the mid-years, for if I don't they will probably change my probation to "special probation" (as it is called), which is the limit, my adviser says, of everything obnoxious. I should have to report—to him most likely—every morning at half-past eight, just to show that I was up bright and early and "in sympathy with the work," so to speak. Then at ten or eleven in the evening I should have to drop in again, which of course would make it impossible to go to the theatre without permission. An extra-sharp lookout would be kept on my work, and altogether special probation is easily a consummation devoutly to be avoided. I suppose I 'll have to grind and grind night and day in order to get everything down cold. I wish now that I had kept on studying an hour or two every day, as I did for about a week after my encounter with the exams in October. I should n't be well prepared even then, but it would n't all seem so perfectly hopeless as it does now. It's so hard, though, to do anything regularly when the front door is unlocked most of the time, as ours is. And there 's no use in locking the door of my room, as the fellows don't knock once and go away, but pound and rattle and shout insulting remarks through the keyhole. All of which makes me feel disagreeable and rather affected,—locking myself up when other people get along so well without that sort of thing. I have n't done it more than once or twice.Anyhow I 'll probably get a good mark in my English Composition. The instructor seems to like my themes and reads a good many of them in class. Lately, however, he has developed the unnecessary trick of pronouncing the words, when he is reading, exactly as they are spelled, which is extremely trying for me and not fair to the theme. It has made several really good ones sound ridiculous. Spelling is n't my strong point, I know; but I draw the line at Berri's guying me about it,—Berri, whose spelling, unless he digs every other word out of the dictionary, looks like some kind of absurd French dialect. He has recently taken to getting off a rigmarole (it's supposed to be about me) that begins something like this,—"'Berri, how do you spell "parallel"?'"'Why, p-a-r-a-l-l-e-l, of course.'"'Thank you; that's the way I have it.' (Then nothing was heard but the scratching of a penknife.)"I think they 're rather fussy about details here. On the back of my last theme the instructor wrote: "By the way, dotting one'si's and crossing one'st's are charming literary habits when once acquired."However, I think I shall get a good mark in this course, notwithstanding. But life isn't all English Composition, and I have a terrible amount of work to do in the other things. Berri and I began, in a way, to prepare for the ordeal by going to the theatre for the last time until the mid-year period is at an end. We made an occasion of it, and ended by doing something that I had never dreamed we were going to do when we started out. It was foolish, I suppose, and I don't know exactly what mamma would think about it. I should like to tell her and find out, but I 'm afraid papa might get hold of it, and my idea of his opinion on the subject is somewhat less vague. What we did was to invite one of the girls in the show to supper.Berri proposed it. We were sitting in the front row away to one side, and when the second act was about half over, he exclaimed to me,—"There, she 's done it again; that's the third time." I asked him what he meant, and he replied that one of the girls on our side of the stage had winked at us. The attention, he explained, must have been meant for us. And for a variety of reasons it did n't seem as if it could have been intended for any one else. In the first place our seats were the last in the row. Behind us were some ladies, and on the other side of Berri was a very old man who sat half turned away from the stage, holding a great black tin trumpet to his ear, as if he were expecting the actors to lean over the footlights and pour something into it."I don't want to appear vain," Berri went on, "but as a mere matter of geographical position I think that we 're It." The comedian was singing a song in the middle of the stage, and on either side of him was a row of girls—convent girls they were supposed to be—who joined in the chorus at the end of every verse and shook their fingers at him reprovingly. They were all dressed in tights. This was n't the convent uniform (they had appeared in that during the first act), and was explained by the fact that they had been rehearsing for private theatricals when the comedian fell in through the window. The comedian was a burglar, andhistights were merely a clever disguise. He was making the girls believe that he was a professional actor hired by the mother superior to teach them how to sing and dance. This was the plot, and it was really rather complicated, for when they all decided to leave the convent with the burglar and spend the evening at a roof-garden, they rushed in dressed as policemen, pretending that they had come to arrest the burglar. The mother superior did n't recognize them, of course, and was naturally glad to have the burglar taken away. Then, at the roof-garden—in the third act—they appeared as waiters; all of which made it hard for me to keep track of them very well. But Berri could spot our girl every time, and by carefully examining the program and comparing the names of the chorus with the various changes of costume she went through, he managed in some way, by the end of the second act, to discover her name. It was Miss Mae Ysobelle. To tell the truth, I did n't think her particularly pretty. She was tall and not a bit graceful, and when she danced she looked as if it were hard work to move her arms and legs the right number of times and finish with the others. She smiled a great deal, but the moment she stopped dancing her mouth sort of snapped back to place as if it were made of stiff red rubber. I found, after watching her for a long time, that my own mouth got very tired. I told Berri this; also that her clothes looked as if they had been made for some one else. But Berri somehow seemed to think she might be unusually agreeable if one knew her."Very often, you know, really pretty people don't make up well at all; and as for her clothes looking as if they did n't belong to her, why, she can't help that, poor thing! they probably don't. She is a little knock-kneed, but you would n't notice that if she had a skirt on.""Well, there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger of our seeing her with a skirt," I answered, for some of the convent girls—Mae Ysobelle among them—had suddenly changed their minds about being waiters and had decided to give the interrupted private theatricals right there on the roof-garden stage. They came prancing in dressed as jockeys, while the man in the orchestra who, as Berri says, supplies music with local color, slapped two thin boards together to imitate the crack of a whip."Oh, I don't know," Berri mused; "we might manage to meet her after the show,—ask her to supper or something. She seems friendly enough," he added; for, as he was speaking, the jockeys drew up at the edge of the stage, touched their caps, then leaned over, andallwinked. Miss Ysobelle was unmistakably looking at us as she did it.I did n't believe she would go with us even if we asked her, but Berri said we 'd rush out after the third act and buy her some flowers and send an usher behind the scenes with them. We ended by doing this—we got her a big box of roses—and writing a note asking her to meet us at the stage door when the performance was ended. Berri signed it "Front row—extreme left."We did n't get an answer to it, at least not in words; but when the curtain went up again on a scene in the convent garden, Miss Ysobelle had one of our roses in her hair and another at her belt, and I began to feel excited at the prospect of meeting her. In fact, the whole last act had a personal interest for us that the others had not. It was almost like being on the stage and enjoying everything from the inside. I even felt rather sorry for the rest of the audience who were sitting there perfectly oblivious to the intrigue going on in the blaze of the footlights, before their unsuspecting eyes. One thing struck us both as rather odd at first. Miss Ysobelle, except for the roses, scrupulously ignored us through the entire act. She not only never winked at us, she never even looked at us. In fact, she gave us both the impression that she had become absorbed in something at the other side of the house. I could n't understand this, and neither could Berri, although he said there was probably some theatrical etiquette connected with her averted gaze, or perhaps the stage-manager had told her to be more dignified. We decided to ask her about it at supper. Well, we never got a chance to ask her, but we found out soon enough for ourselves.As we had the last seats on the left side of the front row, we were naturally the last to get into the middle aisle on the way out, or, rather, we and the people who had the corresponding seats on the other side of the house were the last. We met them when we reached the end of our row, and had to stop a moment as they stood there putting on their overcoats and blocking the way. One of them I noticed particularly,—a great, big thug of a creature who had shiny black hair slicked up in front with a barbery flourish, and a very fancy waistcoat and cravat. They kept just ahead of us on the way out, and laughed a good deal. Berri and I were unusually silent.We did n't go quite to the stage door, as the electric light fizzing right over it made everything in the little alley as bright as day. Neither of us was very keen to join the group loitering near by, so we stood a little back in the shadow and waited. Finally some men with their collars turned up came out; then two women with thick veils on. They seemed to be in a great hurry, and for a few seconds we were afraid that one of them might be Miss Ysobelle; but we remembered how tall she was and did n't run after them. Then more men came, and more girls,—some of whom were joined by men waiting at the door. It seemed at last as if the whole company must have come out, and Berri and I were beginning to think that Miss Mae Ysobelle must have left before we arrived, when the door opened once more and she appeared with our box of flowers in her arms. For a moment she stood on the step and looked around expectantly."I think we ought to go up," Berri murmured nervously; but I thought it would be better to wait and join her as she passed by.Then a queer thing happened. Just as she decided to leave the step, who should go up to her but the big thug with the shiny hair and loud waistcoat? He lifted his hat and shook hands with her very cordially, then took the box of flowers—our flowers—and strolled away with her out of the alley to the street. As they passed by, we heard her exclaim, "Say, it was awful nice of you to send those Jacques. When Myrtle seen me open the box—" The rest of the sentence was lost in the rattle of a cab.Berri and I waited a moment before coming out of the shadow. Then we looked at each other, and Berri shrieked with laughter. We laughed all the way back to Cambridge. The people in the car must have thought—I don't know what they could have thought. For a long time we could n't imagine why things had turned out as they had until Berri remembered that he had signed the note "Front row—extreme left." He had meant our left, but Miss Ysobelle no doubt thought that it referred to her left,—which was quite another matter.XVI've been dead to the world for more than a month; it seems about a year. Yet when I came to look at the situation squarely, there wasn't anything else to do exactly. It was a case of getting the drop on my exams or letting them get the drop on me. Of course, I could have sort of fooled with them and thought I was learning something about them and then perhaps have scraped through in one or two and failed in the others. And this, as a matter of fact, was the way in which Tucker Ludlow and I did go at them at first. Tucker came up to my room two or three times, armed with some type-written notes on Greek architecture that he had bought at one of the book stores in the Square. The first time he came was rather late in the afternoon. He examined everything in my room, and we talked a good deal; he had been out West once, and seemed to know much more about that part of the country than I did. However, we finally got to work and had read about two pages of the notes when Hemington came in. He saw that we were grinding, and said he would n't sit down and interrupt us, especially as he ought to be in his own room, grinding himself. He did n't actually sit down, but leaned against the mantelpiece and smoked for a while, and then compromised by half sitting on the arm of a chair in a temporary way and swinging his leg. When at last he got up to leave, it was so near dinner that Ludlow went with him, and said he would continue some other time. He left the notes with me, and at first I thought I should study them alone, but as Ludlow and I had agreed to grind the course up together, there did n't seem to be any point in getting ahead of him; so in a few minutes I went to dinner myself.The next time Ludlow came to study was in the evening. He proposed that I should read the notes aloud, as he found the architectural terms so hard to pronounce; we were to stop and talk over anything we did n't understand. I made myself comfortable in a chair near the lamp, and Ludlow drew up to the fire. After droning along for about ten minutes about triglyphs and epistyles and entablatures and all that sort of thing, I suddenly had a jealous feeling that he was getting more good from the performance than I was, for he had n't asked a question, while I had n't understood a single sentence. Finally, without looking up, I said,—"Tucker, if you really know what 'pseudo-peripteral' means, I wish you would tell me." Tucker didn't answer, and I thought he was probably trying to get at a definition simple enough for me to grasp. But when I glanced over toward the fireplace, I saw that he was asleep with his mouth open. Well, I felt rather angry at first,—it all seemed such a waste of time; but it struck me, too, as being funny, so I did n't wake him. He must have slept for at least ten minutes longer (of course I did n't bother about reading aloud any more), and then he came to, exclaiming,—"Read that about the ground plan once more; I don't think I quite got that." As the ground plan was almost the first topic mentioned, I suppose he had dozed off almost immediately. After that I made him do the reading, but he had n't stumbled through many pages before he put down the notes and said,—"Granny, don't you think that if we tackled this beastly drivel in the daytime, our heads would be clearer?"That was the end of our grinding together. He came to my room once more, but I was out. It was after this experience that I thought the matter over and decided I should have to do the thing differently, and for the most part alone. My most brilliant stroke was getting the key of Duggie's room from Mrs. Chester; I could lock myself up there and be perfectly safe. When fellows saw my own door wide open and no one at home, they went away at once without making a row. Of course I had to let Berri into the game; but as he began to be scared about some of his own exams, he was grateful for the refuge and did n't give it away.I went to work at the whole business scientifically, determined not to leave a single thing, however unimportant, to chance. And I 'm convinced now that if I have the nerve always to do this, I can get through any examination I 'm ever likely to have,—not brilliantly, perhaps, but very respectably. First of all, I spent a day in the library and got hold of a lot of books that gave my various courses in their simplest, clearest form. For the Fine Arts course I found that a copy of the notes that Ludlow had was better than anything. They stated facts in a condensed way that made it possible to keep in your head a bird's-eye view of the entire course, as far as we had gone. Then I made a list of the number of pages of general reading we had to accomplish in every course, and split them up so as to be able to get through them all—taking notes as I read—by reading a certain number of pages a day. I left a margin at the end for review and in case of accidents. And finally, after I had made these preparations and collected as many of the necessary books as I could (I had to do some of my reading in the library), I locked Duggie's door one morning after breakfast, and sat down at his desk, and stayed there until luncheon; and after luncheon I went back and stayed until it was time to go to the gym and take a run; and after dinner I went back and stayed until bedtime. And I did this every day with very few interruptions until I could pick up any of the text-books, turn to the alphabetical index, and plough right through it, describing in detail every darned thing it mentioned; and an alphabetical index mentions a good deal. If I slipped up on anything, I would mark it with a pencil, go back and learn it. Oh, it was perfectly awful! I got so tired and discouraged and maudlin at times that I would have to lean back and close my eyes and let my bursting mind become a throbbing blank for a few minutes, in order to keep from screaming. But after the gym and the run and the shower-bath, I felt all right again,—just as if nothing had happened.Two courses—the physics and philosophy—I had to tutor in for a while. There was no use pegging away at them by myself, for I simply did n't understand some of the experiments, and logic I could n't make head or tail of. A Senior who lived in College House explained them to me in simple golden words (three dollars an hour were his terms), and when I once saw through it all and had it down on paper in my own language, I could let it soak in at home. The other things—the ones I did understand, like History and Fine Arts—were merely a matter of incessant repetition and memory.The night before the Fine Arts exam I went to what is called a "Seminar" in that subject. I could have got along very well without it after my days and days of slavery, but about every one I knew was going, and I wanted to see what it was like. There are several men here who make a business of boiling popular courses down to their most painlessly swallowable dimensions, and then giving the thing the evening before the examination in a kind of lecture, for which they charge an admittance fee of three or four dollars. This performance is a seminar,—a kind of royal road, if not to learning at least to passing examinations. They say that fellows who never look at a book or take a note in class often go to a seminar and, providing they have good memories, are able to answer enough questions on the exam paper the next morning to get through with colors flying. A certain number of questions on almost every paper simply have to deal with cold, isolated facts rather than with the generalities, comparisons, and discussions that necessitate a real knowledge of the subject, and it is with these facts—pounded in at a seminar—that one puts up a successful bluff. The authorities naturally object to all this. As Berri remarked about the seminar we went to,—"After a professor has earnestly expounded a subject for half a year, it must make him rather sore to have a cheeky parrot get up and do the whole thing much better in four hours."The Fine Arts seminar was held in a huge room, almost a hall, in a kind of office building near the Square. It was advertised to begin at half-past seven, and pretty much every one was there on time,—all the sports of the Freshman and Sophomore classes, some Juniors, and even a few Seniors. It was what the society reporter refers to as "a large and fashionable gathering." It certainly was a mighty nice-looking crowd of fellows; clean, well dressed, and (to quote Berri) "much more intelligent in appearance than we actually are, or we should n't be here at all." As every man came in, he was given a large sheet of stiff paper on which was printed a synopsis of the course, with all the subjects that had been touched on methodically arranged, and a list of definitions, simple and easily remembered, but adequate. It was Greek art in a nutshell,—a perfect marvel of clearness and condensation. The little folding chairs had been neatly arranged in a semicircle at first, but by the time the fellows had taken possession of them, they looked as if they had been thrown in at random. A good many men who were evidently old hands at the business arranged themselves comfortably in two chairs, leaning back in one with their legs stretched across another, as if prepared to spend the night. A lot of them took off their coats and waistcoats—the crowd and the gas made the already overheated room unbearably warm—and I 've never seen so many pretty shirts in my life as I did that evening.After every one was settled, the man who was giving the seminar took a chair on a little platform in front of us, and began—not to talk exactly, but to drone. He had a harsh monotonous voice—une voix trainante, Berri called it—and spoke with painful slowness, as if trying not to emphasize any one topic to the exclusion of the others,—which had the effect of making his entire discourse, from beginning to end, horribly important. Except for this crawling sound, the room was absolutely silent; for once nobody seemed conscious of himself or of any one else. Even when the man on the platform pronounced Greek words in a novel fashion that was all his own, there was n't a smile. I don't think we realized the intense strain of attention we were undergoing until, at the end of an hour and three quarters, Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to sleep, fell off his chair. The second or two of relaxation that followed the crash was exquisite. We stretched our arms and swabbed our foreheads with our handkerchiefs, and then sank back again for another hour and fifteen minutes, until the bell in the tower of Memorial boomed out ten o'clock. This seemed to be the signal for a short vacation; for the fact-machine on the platform finished the sentence he had begun and then stood up.There was a general shuffling of chairs and a babbling of voices, and the crowd divided into chattering groups. Some of the fellows did n't seem to know anybody, and they either went out and strolled up and down the corridor or sat studying the synopsis. The host of the evening had provided beer and ginger ale and cheese and crackers with which to sustain life until the ordeal was over. He could well afford it, as there were at least seventy-five men in the room, every one of whom would deposit three dollars and a half before he left.While Berri and I and most of our table were talking in a corner, a fellow named Smith, a Sophomore, sauntered over to us. Berri and I were the only ones who knew him, so of course he must have come just to speak to us. I don't remember what he said exactly, as the conversation of the others sort of faded away when he approached, and Berri and I were fearfully rattled. He 's very prominent and belongs to everything. After we had stood there for a minute or two, Hemington and Bertie Stockbridge and the others drifted off, leaving us three together, and in a moment more Berri said, "I 'm going over to get another cracker," and also left us. I happened to notice that he did n't go near the crackers, and furthermore he never came back. This seemed so queer and unlike Berri that I spoke to him about it on the way home and asked him why he had done it. He answered by saying,—"You don't have to be much of a fox to know when you 're wanted and when you 're not; and that happened to be one of the times when I wasn't." This struck me as absurd, and does still. Berri knew Smith every bit as well as I did, for the only other time he had ever spoken to us we happened to be together just as we were the night of the seminar. I reminded Berri of this; but he only laughed a little and replied,—"Well, as Fleetwood says, 'I 'm an old man and I know my place.'" Since then Smith has joined me twice when I was walking through the Yard and seemed very friendly in a distant kind of way. I mean that his joining me at all was friendly; he is n't much of a talker, and I never know quite what to say to him. Of course it's very nice in him to do it, but it makes me rather uncomfortable; for both times we stopped a moment on the steps of Sever—the bell had n't rung yet—and although there were a lot of fellows I knew waiting to go in, they merely nodded to me and then looked away.But I 'm forgetting about the seminar. We went back to our chairs again, and once more tuned our ears to the monotonous voice of the lecturer, that dragged on and on till midnight. It became harder and harder to take in everything he said. The air was heavy with the smoke of Egyptian cigarettes, and I counted nine men who were sound asleep. I suppose that, even though asleep, they were more likely to acquire a fact or two than if they hadn't been there at all. Just at the end—I can hear him now—the man on the platform leaned back wearily with closed eyes and chanted in the same hopeless tone,—"Let me once more urge upon you the importance of expressing in your examination papers sympathy with the Greek life, the Greek art, and the Greek ideals of the best period. A page or two of sincere regret that we moderns do not possess the innate sense of beauty, the joy of life, civic pride, harmony, and all the other things that the Greeks went in for will help you to get a passing mark. Remember what I told you about [Greek: sophrosúne]. Refer to [Greek: sophrosúne] constantly. John Addington Symonds calls it 'that truly Greek virtue; the correlative in morals to the passion for beauty.' S-y-m-o-n-d-s, and there are twods in Addington. If you get stuck, make use of the quotation I gave you from Goethe—G-o-e-t-h-e—it comes in well almost anywhere. Good-night and good luck." He stood at the door as we passed out, holding a box in his hand, into which every one dropped three Plunks and a half. I was tired when we got home and went right to bed. But Berri sat up almost until morning, studying the synopsis and going over his notes.It must have been some time before this that Berri's thesis arrived from England one morning with a long letter from Duggie. I have kept a sort of lookout for it right along, but that morning Berri saw the postman from my window and ran downstairs to meet him. As he was coming up, he exclaimed in a surprised voice, "What on earth do you suppose—" and then broke off abruptly. He passed quickly through my room, dropping a bill on my desk as he went, and after that the house for about half an hour was very silent. I had so often wondered what Berri would do, what he would say, how he would take Duggie's letter when it came, that I instinctively knew it had at last arrived, and asked no questions.He surprised me by neither saying nor doing anything; and for two days I had no reason to suppose that the thesis had wandered back to Cambridge at all beyond the feeling in my bones that it had. On the third day, however, Berri, who was just starting off to spend Sunday at his aunt's, stopped in my room with a letter in his hand. He looked at it doubtfully for a moment, as if making up his mind about something, and then tossed it into my lap."I got that from Sherwin the other day," he said; and then added, as he made for the door and I drew the letter from its envelope,—"Well, it may be all for the best."I don't think anybody could read Duggie's letter and not feel that it was for the best. Berri has n't said anything more about it, and neither have I. There really is n't anything to say.I passed all my exams. My marks are n't anything to be stuck up about, but they let me through decently, and in three courses were even a little better than they actually had to be,—which is a comfort in a way. For my adviser says he thinks that in a few weeks it would n't do any harm to petition the administrative board (or whatever it is that has charge of such things) to let me off probation. He says he can't promise anything, of course, but that stranger things have happened; all of which seems to me rather to explode Berri's conviction that every adviser in college spends all his odd moments in devising fiendish schemes for the destruction of his Freshmen charges. But then Berri was unfortunate in his adviser. He is n't young and does n't try to be sympathetic like mine, and he annoys Berri extremely by glaring at him over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and exclaimingà proposof nothing,—"You can't fool me—you can't fool me!"My adviser has had me to dinner twice at the professors' club. He invites his Freshmen, four or five at a time, to dinner, in order, I suppose, to get to know them better. Of course, he never really does get to know us better by having these stiff little parties, but it's awfully kind of him to ask us, and he thinks he does; so it's all right. I dreaded the first one, but my dread was n't a patch on the dread with which I dreaded the second, because I 'd been to the first. Naturally I did n't dare refuse to go to either of them. Nobody does. The dinner itself is good, and my adviser not only lays himself out to be just as nice as possible,—he succeeds. Yet the fellows don't feel altogether at their ease somehow and are n't themselves. They want to be and try to be, and once in a while they put up a pretty good bluff at it, but they never quite are. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but when you can't help feeling that your host is sizing you up and talking only about the things he thinks you like to talk about—even if you do like to talk about them, why, you just can't. (I've read that sentence over six times and it means a little less every time.) After dinner he takes the fellows up to his room and asks them to smoke, and they never know which would be the better swipe,—to accept or to refuse. Some decide one way and some the other; but whether they want to smoke or not has very little to do with the decision. The best part of the evening comes when somebody gets up enough nerve to murmur that he is very sorry he has to say good-night, as he has a lot of studying to do. This usually makes the others laugh, and it always breaks up the party. Then the fellows get together in somebody's room—if they know one another well enough—and talk the thing over.Oh, I wish spring would come! This seems to be the time of year when nothing much happens. As long as we were all grinding most of the day for the mid-years, I didn't think much about the weather, except that when it was bad there wasn't so much temptation to idle out of doors. Now, however, everybody wants the weather to be good, and it's vile. It always manages to do four or five different things in the course of a day, and the walking is unspeakable. To a certain extent, though, this is the fault of the town itself. Most of the residence streets have dirt sidewalks and curbstones that might be very picturesque in Egypt or some place where it did n't rain and snow and freeze and melt all in the course of a few hours; but here they turn into troughs full of mud and slush, and the curbstones keep the mixture from running into the gutter. I know I ought n't to criticise such a fine old town. So many great people have, all their lives, floundered uncomplainingly through Cambridge mud that I suppose it's cheeky of me to notice it. But in wet weather the sidewalks are really not nice. In front of a few houses the owners put down temporary wooden walks,—three boards wide, running lengthwise,—but you invariably meet a lady in the middle of them and have to jump gracefully into the nearest puddle, looking as if you considered this the dearest privilege of your young life.The candidates for the track team are crazy to get out of doors and begin regular practice on the Soldiers' Field cinder track, but it 's too soft yet to be raked and rolled, and they have to keep working in the gym and on the tiresome old board track behind it. Dick Smith was talking about this not long ago when he joined me in the Yard. He says it's great on a warm spring morning to go across the river and sit on the bleachers and watch the fellows practise starting and short sprints.Well, there's nothing like that now. I hardly know how the days go by.
XIV
Well, as I said, something reminded Berri of that night, and as we were on a deserted road far from Cambridge, he referred to it,—indirectly at first, and afterwards right out in so many words. But he didn't talk in the same free and airy strain he had been talking in before, and although I wanted to hear what he said and ask questions and say a few things myself, I had a feeling all the time that perhaps we ought to change the subject; it made me uncomfortable. Then I thought of the way I had talked to Duggie the first evening, away back in September, and positively blushed when I remembered that I had asked him, outright, how one ought to go about getting on clubs. Why, that was enough to sewer me with almost anybody in the world but Duggie. Imagine my doing such a thing now! No one ever thinks of mentioning the clubs in general conversation. Of course once in a while some fresh kid who happens to live next door to one of them comes out with an allusion of some kind, and embarrasses everybody to death; and I 've had one or two upper classmen—Juniors or Seniors—who hadn't made the Dickey and didn't belong to a club talk to me quite freely about the whole matter in a tone that implied that such things were all very well, no doubt, but did n't interest them particularly. You can get a good deal of information from upper classmen of this kind,—fellows who are n't on clubs and have given up expecting to be; they don't think you fresh. But it would never do to ask for any from a Dickey man; that would be awful. Why, you 'd never be taken on if you did that.
Even Berri does n't seem to know much about the Dickey, or, if he does, he did n't tell me anything very definite. He said, though, that if you didn't make it, you might just as well pack up and go home; that Dickey men kind of flocked together and did n't go outside much for their friends, and that the fellows you wanted to know usually were on the Dickey. Then, too, he said that if a man did n't make the Dickey, he wasn't likely to be taken into a club. Berri seemed to know a lot about the clubs. I knew hardly anything at all; in fact, I thought the Dickey was a club, but he says it isn't,—that it's a society. The clubs, he says, are great. His uncle took him to one for breakfast once before he—Berri—got into college. (Of course he couldn't be taken to one now.) He said he did n't notice anything particularly secret about it; it was just like one of the good clubs in town. I found out the names of most of them from him—they seem to have Greek names, yet are called by queer nicknames as a rule—and where they are. This last, however, I knew pretty well before, but I did n't know which was which, and could n't ask exactly. I had often seen fellows going in and out of certain houses along Mount Auburn Street that did n't look like residences somehow, although they might have been, and wondered just what they were. At night, even with the shades down, they were always lighted from top to bottom. No matter how late it was, the lights were there, cheerful and inviting,—which in itself seemed remarkable when I considered how early Cambridge (the town, I mean) goes to bed. But one morning when I was hurrying to a lecture, two fellows came out of Claverly Hall, and one of them said to the other, "Hold up a minute; I left my note-book at the club," and dashed across the street. Then it suddenly dawned on me. Of course I never look curiously at them any more, but just walk right on with my eyes fixed on something in the distance as if they were ordinary houses. I can't help wondering, sometimes, whether anybody ever noticed me staring at them and at the fellows going in and out—before I knew. I hope not.
When I asked Duggie about getting into clubs that time, I remember he evaded the subject (which was darned good of him, it seems to me now) by saying something about being polite to everybody.
"That's all very well," Berri answered, when I laughed a little and told him about it, "but there's such a thing as being too polite. You see, there are fellows right now in our class—you know who they are and I do too—who are, even as early as this, being considered for the First Ten. If you suddenly turned in and tried to make yourself nice to them, why, everybody would say you were 'swiping;' and so you would be. The First Ten elects the Second Ten, you know."
"Duggie did n't mean that you ought to be polite only to the fellows you think are going to help you along," I answered. "It was exactly the reverse of that. What he meant was that you ought to be the same to everybody."
"I wonder ifhewas," Berri mused. "It's so easy, after you 've once got to the top yourself, to think you did it all with the help of the Scriptures. It's like these old vultures who 've stolen everything in sight ever since they were born, beginning their magazine articles on 'How to Get Rich' with: 'Honesty and Industry must be the motto of him who would attain wealth!'"
I refused to see any connection between Duggie and the old vultures, and tried to get back to the clubs. However, we did n't say much more about them, and squabbled most of the way home over the subject of popularity. It does seem queer that some fellows have so many friends, while others who start with about the same opportunities and even greater natural advantages now and then have so few. I suggested that when a fellow was tremendously popular and "in" everything—and I could n't see why it was exactly—he probably had very interesting or fascinating qualities that I had n't perhaps discovered. Berri, however, maintained that popularity was often nothing but an idiotic fashion, and mentioned several popular fellows he did n't like, to prove it.
"Now look at Tucker Ludlow," he burst out. "What is he? A dissipated little beast; you know he is, everybody knows he is. Not that I should mind his being dissipated and a beast, if he were ever anything else; but he isn't. He's stupid, and he 's ignorant, and he is n't even good-looking, yet he moves in a crowd,—a nice crowd too; and when he moves, the crowd moves with him. That's nothing but fashion. It is n't possible that anybody can really like the creature. But it amounts to the same thing; I 've already heard it kind of whispered around that he 'll be on the First Ten."
What Berri said interested me very much, for Ludlow and I had agreed, a few days before, to grind together on a course for the mid-year exams. I had intended to remind him of it, but now that Berri said he was spoken of for the First Ten I don't like to; people might think I was swiping. I don't care much for Ludlow myself; but he doesn't irritate me the way he does Berri, and I do think there must be something to him.
After the freaks of fashion, Berri seemed to think that the most popular men—in one's Freshman year anyhow—were the fellows whose opportunities for making friends were good to begin with, and who were n't in any way particularly startling,—athletics, of course, always excepted; athletes never lack a following. But it does n't do, he says, to be different, or to excel at first in much of anything else. You may with perfect safety have the reputation for knowing things or being clever, but that 's very different from really knowing or being. The man who actually knows or is, is doomed.
"What about Reggie Howard, then?" I asked. Everybody likes Howard, and yet he knows a fearful amount and is as clever as any one could be. I knew Berri thought so, and wondered how he would get out of it.
"Yes, Reggie's wise,—very wise," he admitted, "but with the exception of you and me, almost no one suspects it. He does n't object to my knowing, because he feels sure I don't mind; and you 're safe because you 're so kind. But he takes care that people generally don't get on to it. That's part of his wisdom."
One thing I 've learned here that surprised me a good deal, and that is—popularity has nothing to do with money. I always had an idea that people with money to throw to the birds could n't help being liked; but that evidently is n't the case. And Berri did n't have to tell me; I found it out for myself. Of course it's nice to be able to live in comfortable rooms and have plenty to eat and wear decent clothes. No one objects to that, and no one objects, apparently, to a fellow's doing more than that,—to spending, indeed, a good deal of money if he has it to spend. But the mere fact of a man's having a record-breaking allowance does n't seem to interest people in the least, and if some frightfully rich fellow comes to college with a flourish of trumpets in the Sunday papers about his father's income, and how many horses he intends to keep, and how much the furnishing of his rooms will probably cost, it 's decidedly against him. I was thinking, I suppose, of Tony Earle in our class. His father makes millions and millions out of safety-matches—I believe it is. Anyhow, everybody speaks of Tony as "His Matchesty," and has very little to do with him. The fellows are simply prejudiced against him because the papers said he had so much money. And he 's really a perfectly harmless, rather quiet sort of person who plays well on the piano. Berri and I spent an evening with him once. We were dining in town, and Earle was all alone across the room. He looked so dreary that Berri finally exclaimed,—
"For heaven's sake, why doesn't some one take pity on that poor wretched millionaire? It's positively pathetic!"
I suggested asking him to come over and have his dinner with us. But Berri, like every one else, objected.
"He 'd probably order nightingales or peacocks or some such thing, and then insist on paying for us," he said.
"Well, let's ask him and see," I urged. "We'll make that the test. If he tries to pay the whole bill, he won't do." So Berri went over and asked him to join us, and he turned out just as I said,—quiet and not especially interesting, but a good deal nicer than a lot of fellows who won't know him. When it came to paying the waiter, Berri kicked me under the table and spent an indecently long time in looking over the check. I think he was actually disappointed when Earle glanced across the table and merely said,—
"By the way, what's my share?"
When we got to Cambridge he asked us over to his rooms. They certainly are dreams; even Berri could n't find anything wrong with them. He bangs the box like a wizard.
"I was afraid he was going to say he was lonely, or something melodramatic like that, when we got up to leave and he asked us to come again," Berri remarked on the way home. "Of course he is horribly lonely, and it was very considerate of him not to spoil everything by saying so. I think we 'll have to go back. To-morrow at luncheon we can start a society for the prevention of cruelty to millionaires."
Well, if I 'm ever ostracized it won't be because people are scared at my allowance. Papa and I have been having an exceedingly brisk correspondence lately. Just after the family got back to Perugia, Mildred wrote me that papa had won an important lawsuit and was going to get an unusually large fee. So I bought some clothes and a few things I really needed on the strength of it and had the bill sent home, as he made me promise to let him know just what I spent. He replied at some length, declaring, among other things, that I reminded him of what Charles Lamb says of a poor relation; Lamb's remark being, "A poor relation is a preposterous shadow lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity." I expostulated, and told him about Willie Jackson. Willie's elder brother passed through Boston not long ago, and when Willie went in to see him he asked for money with which to buy a dress-suit case and some shoes he needed badly. No one knows exactly how it happened,—some think that Willie had been brooding over the Fine Arts course he is taking and the instructor's plea for more beauty in one's every-day environment. Anyhow, when Willie stepped off the car in Cambridge, he had—not the shoes and the dress-suit case, but a palm and a canary-bird.
To this papa replied that he didn't see why I had taken the trouble to record for his benefit the exploits of Willie Jackson, as he never for a moment had doubted that there were as many fools in college as elsewhere. That is where the matter rests at present.
As there is nothing doing now that you can watch in the afternoon as you can the football practice in the autumn and the baseball and crews in the spring, some of us at the table have become athletes on our own account. We go to the gym every day at about five, and work with chest-weights and dumbbells, and are put through all sorts of agonizing performances in a large class of hard students who never take any other kind of exercise. Then we run up North Avenue as far as the railway-station and back to our rooms. I don't know how far it is, but the return trip at first seemed to be about a hundred miles; it's a little shorter now, and gets shorter every day. After a hot shower-bath and then a cold one you feel eight or ten feet high, and walk through the Square to dinner, sticking out your chest. It's queer you don't catch cold, running in the icy wind with literally nothing on but a pair of tennis shoes, loose short cotton drawers, and a thin sleeveless undershirt; but you never seem to. The gym made me stiff all over for a day or two, but I feel fine now, and wonder why we never thought of it before. The muckers on the Avenue bother us a good deal with snowballs when we run. Hemington very foolishly chased one of them not long ago and washed his face with snow. The paternal mucker has since sued Hemi for assault and battery. Hemi is in a great state about it, and we are all looking forward to cutting a morningful of lectures and testifying in court.
The mid-years are almost here, and I feel as if it were only about the day before yesterday that I was failing in the hour exams. I simply must do well in the mid-years, for if I don't they will probably change my probation to "special probation" (as it is called), which is the limit, my adviser says, of everything obnoxious. I should have to report—to him most likely—every morning at half-past eight, just to show that I was up bright and early and "in sympathy with the work," so to speak. Then at ten or eleven in the evening I should have to drop in again, which of course would make it impossible to go to the theatre without permission. An extra-sharp lookout would be kept on my work, and altogether special probation is easily a consummation devoutly to be avoided. I suppose I 'll have to grind and grind night and day in order to get everything down cold. I wish now that I had kept on studying an hour or two every day, as I did for about a week after my encounter with the exams in October. I should n't be well prepared even then, but it would n't all seem so perfectly hopeless as it does now. It's so hard, though, to do anything regularly when the front door is unlocked most of the time, as ours is. And there 's no use in locking the door of my room, as the fellows don't knock once and go away, but pound and rattle and shout insulting remarks through the keyhole. All of which makes me feel disagreeable and rather affected,—locking myself up when other people get along so well without that sort of thing. I have n't done it more than once or twice.
Anyhow I 'll probably get a good mark in my English Composition. The instructor seems to like my themes and reads a good many of them in class. Lately, however, he has developed the unnecessary trick of pronouncing the words, when he is reading, exactly as they are spelled, which is extremely trying for me and not fair to the theme. It has made several really good ones sound ridiculous. Spelling is n't my strong point, I know; but I draw the line at Berri's guying me about it,—Berri, whose spelling, unless he digs every other word out of the dictionary, looks like some kind of absurd French dialect. He has recently taken to getting off a rigmarole (it's supposed to be about me) that begins something like this,—
"'Berri, how do you spell "parallel"?'
"'Why, p-a-r-a-l-l-e-l, of course.'
"'Thank you; that's the way I have it.' (Then nothing was heard but the scratching of a penknife.)"
I think they 're rather fussy about details here. On the back of my last theme the instructor wrote: "By the way, dotting one'si's and crossing one'st's are charming literary habits when once acquired."
However, I think I shall get a good mark in this course, notwithstanding. But life isn't all English Composition, and I have a terrible amount of work to do in the other things. Berri and I began, in a way, to prepare for the ordeal by going to the theatre for the last time until the mid-year period is at an end. We made an occasion of it, and ended by doing something that I had never dreamed we were going to do when we started out. It was foolish, I suppose, and I don't know exactly what mamma would think about it. I should like to tell her and find out, but I 'm afraid papa might get hold of it, and my idea of his opinion on the subject is somewhat less vague. What we did was to invite one of the girls in the show to supper.
Berri proposed it. We were sitting in the front row away to one side, and when the second act was about half over, he exclaimed to me,—
"There, she 's done it again; that's the third time." I asked him what he meant, and he replied that one of the girls on our side of the stage had winked at us. The attention, he explained, must have been meant for us. And for a variety of reasons it did n't seem as if it could have been intended for any one else. In the first place our seats were the last in the row. Behind us were some ladies, and on the other side of Berri was a very old man who sat half turned away from the stage, holding a great black tin trumpet to his ear, as if he were expecting the actors to lean over the footlights and pour something into it.
"I don't want to appear vain," Berri went on, "but as a mere matter of geographical position I think that we 're It." The comedian was singing a song in the middle of the stage, and on either side of him was a row of girls—convent girls they were supposed to be—who joined in the chorus at the end of every verse and shook their fingers at him reprovingly. They were all dressed in tights. This was n't the convent uniform (they had appeared in that during the first act), and was explained by the fact that they had been rehearsing for private theatricals when the comedian fell in through the window. The comedian was a burglar, andhistights were merely a clever disguise. He was making the girls believe that he was a professional actor hired by the mother superior to teach them how to sing and dance. This was the plot, and it was really rather complicated, for when they all decided to leave the convent with the burglar and spend the evening at a roof-garden, they rushed in dressed as policemen, pretending that they had come to arrest the burglar. The mother superior did n't recognize them, of course, and was naturally glad to have the burglar taken away. Then, at the roof-garden—in the third act—they appeared as waiters; all of which made it hard for me to keep track of them very well. But Berri could spot our girl every time, and by carefully examining the program and comparing the names of the chorus with the various changes of costume she went through, he managed in some way, by the end of the second act, to discover her name. It was Miss Mae Ysobelle. To tell the truth, I did n't think her particularly pretty. She was tall and not a bit graceful, and when she danced she looked as if it were hard work to move her arms and legs the right number of times and finish with the others. She smiled a great deal, but the moment she stopped dancing her mouth sort of snapped back to place as if it were made of stiff red rubber. I found, after watching her for a long time, that my own mouth got very tired. I told Berri this; also that her clothes looked as if they had been made for some one else. But Berri somehow seemed to think she might be unusually agreeable if one knew her.
"Very often, you know, really pretty people don't make up well at all; and as for her clothes looking as if they did n't belong to her, why, she can't help that, poor thing! they probably don't. She is a little knock-kneed, but you would n't notice that if she had a skirt on."
"Well, there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger of our seeing her with a skirt," I answered, for some of the convent girls—Mae Ysobelle among them—had suddenly changed their minds about being waiters and had decided to give the interrupted private theatricals right there on the roof-garden stage. They came prancing in dressed as jockeys, while the man in the orchestra who, as Berri says, supplies music with local color, slapped two thin boards together to imitate the crack of a whip.
"Oh, I don't know," Berri mused; "we might manage to meet her after the show,—ask her to supper or something. She seems friendly enough," he added; for, as he was speaking, the jockeys drew up at the edge of the stage, touched their caps, then leaned over, andallwinked. Miss Ysobelle was unmistakably looking at us as she did it.
I did n't believe she would go with us even if we asked her, but Berri said we 'd rush out after the third act and buy her some flowers and send an usher behind the scenes with them. We ended by doing this—we got her a big box of roses—and writing a note asking her to meet us at the stage door when the performance was ended. Berri signed it "Front row—extreme left."
We did n't get an answer to it, at least not in words; but when the curtain went up again on a scene in the convent garden, Miss Ysobelle had one of our roses in her hair and another at her belt, and I began to feel excited at the prospect of meeting her. In fact, the whole last act had a personal interest for us that the others had not. It was almost like being on the stage and enjoying everything from the inside. I even felt rather sorry for the rest of the audience who were sitting there perfectly oblivious to the intrigue going on in the blaze of the footlights, before their unsuspecting eyes. One thing struck us both as rather odd at first. Miss Ysobelle, except for the roses, scrupulously ignored us through the entire act. She not only never winked at us, she never even looked at us. In fact, she gave us both the impression that she had become absorbed in something at the other side of the house. I could n't understand this, and neither could Berri, although he said there was probably some theatrical etiquette connected with her averted gaze, or perhaps the stage-manager had told her to be more dignified. We decided to ask her about it at supper. Well, we never got a chance to ask her, but we found out soon enough for ourselves.
As we had the last seats on the left side of the front row, we were naturally the last to get into the middle aisle on the way out, or, rather, we and the people who had the corresponding seats on the other side of the house were the last. We met them when we reached the end of our row, and had to stop a moment as they stood there putting on their overcoats and blocking the way. One of them I noticed particularly,—a great, big thug of a creature who had shiny black hair slicked up in front with a barbery flourish, and a very fancy waistcoat and cravat. They kept just ahead of us on the way out, and laughed a good deal. Berri and I were unusually silent.
We did n't go quite to the stage door, as the electric light fizzing right over it made everything in the little alley as bright as day. Neither of us was very keen to join the group loitering near by, so we stood a little back in the shadow and waited. Finally some men with their collars turned up came out; then two women with thick veils on. They seemed to be in a great hurry, and for a few seconds we were afraid that one of them might be Miss Ysobelle; but we remembered how tall she was and did n't run after them. Then more men came, and more girls,—some of whom were joined by men waiting at the door. It seemed at last as if the whole company must have come out, and Berri and I were beginning to think that Miss Mae Ysobelle must have left before we arrived, when the door opened once more and she appeared with our box of flowers in her arms. For a moment she stood on the step and looked around expectantly.
"I think we ought to go up," Berri murmured nervously; but I thought it would be better to wait and join her as she passed by.
Then a queer thing happened. Just as she decided to leave the step, who should go up to her but the big thug with the shiny hair and loud waistcoat? He lifted his hat and shook hands with her very cordially, then took the box of flowers—our flowers—and strolled away with her out of the alley to the street. As they passed by, we heard her exclaim, "Say, it was awful nice of you to send those Jacques. When Myrtle seen me open the box—" The rest of the sentence was lost in the rattle of a cab.
Berri and I waited a moment before coming out of the shadow. Then we looked at each other, and Berri shrieked with laughter. We laughed all the way back to Cambridge. The people in the car must have thought—I don't know what they could have thought. For a long time we could n't imagine why things had turned out as they had until Berri remembered that he had signed the note "Front row—extreme left." He had meant our left, but Miss Ysobelle no doubt thought that it referred to her left,—which was quite another matter.
XV
I've been dead to the world for more than a month; it seems about a year. Yet when I came to look at the situation squarely, there wasn't anything else to do exactly. It was a case of getting the drop on my exams or letting them get the drop on me. Of course, I could have sort of fooled with them and thought I was learning something about them and then perhaps have scraped through in one or two and failed in the others. And this, as a matter of fact, was the way in which Tucker Ludlow and I did go at them at first. Tucker came up to my room two or three times, armed with some type-written notes on Greek architecture that he had bought at one of the book stores in the Square. The first time he came was rather late in the afternoon. He examined everything in my room, and we talked a good deal; he had been out West once, and seemed to know much more about that part of the country than I did. However, we finally got to work and had read about two pages of the notes when Hemington came in. He saw that we were grinding, and said he would n't sit down and interrupt us, especially as he ought to be in his own room, grinding himself. He did n't actually sit down, but leaned against the mantelpiece and smoked for a while, and then compromised by half sitting on the arm of a chair in a temporary way and swinging his leg. When at last he got up to leave, it was so near dinner that Ludlow went with him, and said he would continue some other time. He left the notes with me, and at first I thought I should study them alone, but as Ludlow and I had agreed to grind the course up together, there did n't seem to be any point in getting ahead of him; so in a few minutes I went to dinner myself.
The next time Ludlow came to study was in the evening. He proposed that I should read the notes aloud, as he found the architectural terms so hard to pronounce; we were to stop and talk over anything we did n't understand. I made myself comfortable in a chair near the lamp, and Ludlow drew up to the fire. After droning along for about ten minutes about triglyphs and epistyles and entablatures and all that sort of thing, I suddenly had a jealous feeling that he was getting more good from the performance than I was, for he had n't asked a question, while I had n't understood a single sentence. Finally, without looking up, I said,—
"Tucker, if you really know what 'pseudo-peripteral' means, I wish you would tell me." Tucker didn't answer, and I thought he was probably trying to get at a definition simple enough for me to grasp. But when I glanced over toward the fireplace, I saw that he was asleep with his mouth open. Well, I felt rather angry at first,—it all seemed such a waste of time; but it struck me, too, as being funny, so I did n't wake him. He must have slept for at least ten minutes longer (of course I did n't bother about reading aloud any more), and then he came to, exclaiming,—
"Read that about the ground plan once more; I don't think I quite got that." As the ground plan was almost the first topic mentioned, I suppose he had dozed off almost immediately. After that I made him do the reading, but he had n't stumbled through many pages before he put down the notes and said,—
"Granny, don't you think that if we tackled this beastly drivel in the daytime, our heads would be clearer?"
That was the end of our grinding together. He came to my room once more, but I was out. It was after this experience that I thought the matter over and decided I should have to do the thing differently, and for the most part alone. My most brilliant stroke was getting the key of Duggie's room from Mrs. Chester; I could lock myself up there and be perfectly safe. When fellows saw my own door wide open and no one at home, they went away at once without making a row. Of course I had to let Berri into the game; but as he began to be scared about some of his own exams, he was grateful for the refuge and did n't give it away.
I went to work at the whole business scientifically, determined not to leave a single thing, however unimportant, to chance. And I 'm convinced now that if I have the nerve always to do this, I can get through any examination I 'm ever likely to have,—not brilliantly, perhaps, but very respectably. First of all, I spent a day in the library and got hold of a lot of books that gave my various courses in their simplest, clearest form. For the Fine Arts course I found that a copy of the notes that Ludlow had was better than anything. They stated facts in a condensed way that made it possible to keep in your head a bird's-eye view of the entire course, as far as we had gone. Then I made a list of the number of pages of general reading we had to accomplish in every course, and split them up so as to be able to get through them all—taking notes as I read—by reading a certain number of pages a day. I left a margin at the end for review and in case of accidents. And finally, after I had made these preparations and collected as many of the necessary books as I could (I had to do some of my reading in the library), I locked Duggie's door one morning after breakfast, and sat down at his desk, and stayed there until luncheon; and after luncheon I went back and stayed until it was time to go to the gym and take a run; and after dinner I went back and stayed until bedtime. And I did this every day with very few interruptions until I could pick up any of the text-books, turn to the alphabetical index, and plough right through it, describing in detail every darned thing it mentioned; and an alphabetical index mentions a good deal. If I slipped up on anything, I would mark it with a pencil, go back and learn it. Oh, it was perfectly awful! I got so tired and discouraged and maudlin at times that I would have to lean back and close my eyes and let my bursting mind become a throbbing blank for a few minutes, in order to keep from screaming. But after the gym and the run and the shower-bath, I felt all right again,—just as if nothing had happened.
Two courses—the physics and philosophy—I had to tutor in for a while. There was no use pegging away at them by myself, for I simply did n't understand some of the experiments, and logic I could n't make head or tail of. A Senior who lived in College House explained them to me in simple golden words (three dollars an hour were his terms), and when I once saw through it all and had it down on paper in my own language, I could let it soak in at home. The other things—the ones I did understand, like History and Fine Arts—were merely a matter of incessant repetition and memory.
The night before the Fine Arts exam I went to what is called a "Seminar" in that subject. I could have got along very well without it after my days and days of slavery, but about every one I knew was going, and I wanted to see what it was like. There are several men here who make a business of boiling popular courses down to their most painlessly swallowable dimensions, and then giving the thing the evening before the examination in a kind of lecture, for which they charge an admittance fee of three or four dollars. This performance is a seminar,—a kind of royal road, if not to learning at least to passing examinations. They say that fellows who never look at a book or take a note in class often go to a seminar and, providing they have good memories, are able to answer enough questions on the exam paper the next morning to get through with colors flying. A certain number of questions on almost every paper simply have to deal with cold, isolated facts rather than with the generalities, comparisons, and discussions that necessitate a real knowledge of the subject, and it is with these facts—pounded in at a seminar—that one puts up a successful bluff. The authorities naturally object to all this. As Berri remarked about the seminar we went to,—
"After a professor has earnestly expounded a subject for half a year, it must make him rather sore to have a cheeky parrot get up and do the whole thing much better in four hours."
The Fine Arts seminar was held in a huge room, almost a hall, in a kind of office building near the Square. It was advertised to begin at half-past seven, and pretty much every one was there on time,—all the sports of the Freshman and Sophomore classes, some Juniors, and even a few Seniors. It was what the society reporter refers to as "a large and fashionable gathering." It certainly was a mighty nice-looking crowd of fellows; clean, well dressed, and (to quote Berri) "much more intelligent in appearance than we actually are, or we should n't be here at all." As every man came in, he was given a large sheet of stiff paper on which was printed a synopsis of the course, with all the subjects that had been touched on methodically arranged, and a list of definitions, simple and easily remembered, but adequate. It was Greek art in a nutshell,—a perfect marvel of clearness and condensation. The little folding chairs had been neatly arranged in a semicircle at first, but by the time the fellows had taken possession of them, they looked as if they had been thrown in at random. A good many men who were evidently old hands at the business arranged themselves comfortably in two chairs, leaning back in one with their legs stretched across another, as if prepared to spend the night. A lot of them took off their coats and waistcoats—the crowd and the gas made the already overheated room unbearably warm—and I 've never seen so many pretty shirts in my life as I did that evening.
After every one was settled, the man who was giving the seminar took a chair on a little platform in front of us, and began—not to talk exactly, but to drone. He had a harsh monotonous voice—une voix trainante, Berri called it—and spoke with painful slowness, as if trying not to emphasize any one topic to the exclusion of the others,—which had the effect of making his entire discourse, from beginning to end, horribly important. Except for this crawling sound, the room was absolutely silent; for once nobody seemed conscious of himself or of any one else. Even when the man on the platform pronounced Greek words in a novel fashion that was all his own, there was n't a smile. I don't think we realized the intense strain of attention we were undergoing until, at the end of an hour and three quarters, Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to sleep, fell off his chair. The second or two of relaxation that followed the crash was exquisite. We stretched our arms and swabbed our foreheads with our handkerchiefs, and then sank back again for another hour and fifteen minutes, until the bell in the tower of Memorial boomed out ten o'clock. This seemed to be the signal for a short vacation; for the fact-machine on the platform finished the sentence he had begun and then stood up.
There was a general shuffling of chairs and a babbling of voices, and the crowd divided into chattering groups. Some of the fellows did n't seem to know anybody, and they either went out and strolled up and down the corridor or sat studying the synopsis. The host of the evening had provided beer and ginger ale and cheese and crackers with which to sustain life until the ordeal was over. He could well afford it, as there were at least seventy-five men in the room, every one of whom would deposit three dollars and a half before he left.
While Berri and I and most of our table were talking in a corner, a fellow named Smith, a Sophomore, sauntered over to us. Berri and I were the only ones who knew him, so of course he must have come just to speak to us. I don't remember what he said exactly, as the conversation of the others sort of faded away when he approached, and Berri and I were fearfully rattled. He 's very prominent and belongs to everything. After we had stood there for a minute or two, Hemington and Bertie Stockbridge and the others drifted off, leaving us three together, and in a moment more Berri said, "I 'm going over to get another cracker," and also left us. I happened to notice that he did n't go near the crackers, and furthermore he never came back. This seemed so queer and unlike Berri that I spoke to him about it on the way home and asked him why he had done it. He answered by saying,—
"You don't have to be much of a fox to know when you 're wanted and when you 're not; and that happened to be one of the times when I wasn't." This struck me as absurd, and does still. Berri knew Smith every bit as well as I did, for the only other time he had ever spoken to us we happened to be together just as we were the night of the seminar. I reminded Berri of this; but he only laughed a little and replied,—
"Well, as Fleetwood says, 'I 'm an old man and I know my place.'" Since then Smith has joined me twice when I was walking through the Yard and seemed very friendly in a distant kind of way. I mean that his joining me at all was friendly; he is n't much of a talker, and I never know quite what to say to him. Of course it's very nice in him to do it, but it makes me rather uncomfortable; for both times we stopped a moment on the steps of Sever—the bell had n't rung yet—and although there were a lot of fellows I knew waiting to go in, they merely nodded to me and then looked away.
But I 'm forgetting about the seminar. We went back to our chairs again, and once more tuned our ears to the monotonous voice of the lecturer, that dragged on and on till midnight. It became harder and harder to take in everything he said. The air was heavy with the smoke of Egyptian cigarettes, and I counted nine men who were sound asleep. I suppose that, even though asleep, they were more likely to acquire a fact or two than if they hadn't been there at all. Just at the end—I can hear him now—the man on the platform leaned back wearily with closed eyes and chanted in the same hopeless tone,—
"Let me once more urge upon you the importance of expressing in your examination papers sympathy with the Greek life, the Greek art, and the Greek ideals of the best period. A page or two of sincere regret that we moderns do not possess the innate sense of beauty, the joy of life, civic pride, harmony, and all the other things that the Greeks went in for will help you to get a passing mark. Remember what I told you about [Greek: sophrosúne]. Refer to [Greek: sophrosúne] constantly. John Addington Symonds calls it 'that truly Greek virtue; the correlative in morals to the passion for beauty.' S-y-m-o-n-d-s, and there are twods in Addington. If you get stuck, make use of the quotation I gave you from Goethe—G-o-e-t-h-e—it comes in well almost anywhere. Good-night and good luck." He stood at the door as we passed out, holding a box in his hand, into which every one dropped three Plunks and a half. I was tired when we got home and went right to bed. But Berri sat up almost until morning, studying the synopsis and going over his notes.
It must have been some time before this that Berri's thesis arrived from England one morning with a long letter from Duggie. I have kept a sort of lookout for it right along, but that morning Berri saw the postman from my window and ran downstairs to meet him. As he was coming up, he exclaimed in a surprised voice, "What on earth do you suppose—" and then broke off abruptly. He passed quickly through my room, dropping a bill on my desk as he went, and after that the house for about half an hour was very silent. I had so often wondered what Berri would do, what he would say, how he would take Duggie's letter when it came, that I instinctively knew it had at last arrived, and asked no questions.
He surprised me by neither saying nor doing anything; and for two days I had no reason to suppose that the thesis had wandered back to Cambridge at all beyond the feeling in my bones that it had. On the third day, however, Berri, who was just starting off to spend Sunday at his aunt's, stopped in my room with a letter in his hand. He looked at it doubtfully for a moment, as if making up his mind about something, and then tossed it into my lap.
"I got that from Sherwin the other day," he said; and then added, as he made for the door and I drew the letter from its envelope,—
"Well, it may be all for the best."
I don't think anybody could read Duggie's letter and not feel that it was for the best. Berri has n't said anything more about it, and neither have I. There really is n't anything to say.
I passed all my exams. My marks are n't anything to be stuck up about, but they let me through decently, and in three courses were even a little better than they actually had to be,—which is a comfort in a way. For my adviser says he thinks that in a few weeks it would n't do any harm to petition the administrative board (or whatever it is that has charge of such things) to let me off probation. He says he can't promise anything, of course, but that stranger things have happened; all of which seems to me rather to explode Berri's conviction that every adviser in college spends all his odd moments in devising fiendish schemes for the destruction of his Freshmen charges. But then Berri was unfortunate in his adviser. He is n't young and does n't try to be sympathetic like mine, and he annoys Berri extremely by glaring at him over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and exclaimingà proposof nothing,—
"You can't fool me—you can't fool me!"
My adviser has had me to dinner twice at the professors' club. He invites his Freshmen, four or five at a time, to dinner, in order, I suppose, to get to know them better. Of course, he never really does get to know us better by having these stiff little parties, but it's awfully kind of him to ask us, and he thinks he does; so it's all right. I dreaded the first one, but my dread was n't a patch on the dread with which I dreaded the second, because I 'd been to the first. Naturally I did n't dare refuse to go to either of them. Nobody does. The dinner itself is good, and my adviser not only lays himself out to be just as nice as possible,—he succeeds. Yet the fellows don't feel altogether at their ease somehow and are n't themselves. They want to be and try to be, and once in a while they put up a pretty good bluff at it, but they never quite are. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but when you can't help feeling that your host is sizing you up and talking only about the things he thinks you like to talk about—even if you do like to talk about them, why, you just can't. (I've read that sentence over six times and it means a little less every time.) After dinner he takes the fellows up to his room and asks them to smoke, and they never know which would be the better swipe,—to accept or to refuse. Some decide one way and some the other; but whether they want to smoke or not has very little to do with the decision. The best part of the evening comes when somebody gets up enough nerve to murmur that he is very sorry he has to say good-night, as he has a lot of studying to do. This usually makes the others laugh, and it always breaks up the party. Then the fellows get together in somebody's room—if they know one another well enough—and talk the thing over.
Oh, I wish spring would come! This seems to be the time of year when nothing much happens. As long as we were all grinding most of the day for the mid-years, I didn't think much about the weather, except that when it was bad there wasn't so much temptation to idle out of doors. Now, however, everybody wants the weather to be good, and it's vile. It always manages to do four or five different things in the course of a day, and the walking is unspeakable. To a certain extent, though, this is the fault of the town itself. Most of the residence streets have dirt sidewalks and curbstones that might be very picturesque in Egypt or some place where it did n't rain and snow and freeze and melt all in the course of a few hours; but here they turn into troughs full of mud and slush, and the curbstones keep the mixture from running into the gutter. I know I ought n't to criticise such a fine old town. So many great people have, all their lives, floundered uncomplainingly through Cambridge mud that I suppose it's cheeky of me to notice it. But in wet weather the sidewalks are really not nice. In front of a few houses the owners put down temporary wooden walks,—three boards wide, running lengthwise,—but you invariably meet a lady in the middle of them and have to jump gracefully into the nearest puddle, looking as if you considered this the dearest privilege of your young life.
The candidates for the track team are crazy to get out of doors and begin regular practice on the Soldiers' Field cinder track, but it 's too soft yet to be raked and rolled, and they have to keep working in the gym and on the tiresome old board track behind it. Dick Smith was talking about this not long ago when he joined me in the Yard. He says it's great on a warm spring morning to go across the river and sit on the bleachers and watch the fellows practise starting and short sprints.
Well, there's nothing like that now. I hardly know how the days go by.