“I ought to be able to. I have it pretty well in mind.”
“But it would be such a stupid job, doing it all over again. You probably wouldn’t do it nearly so well as you did it the first time. I should think you’d better write on something else; you’d have more interest then.”
“I won’t go at it at once, anyway. I’ll wait a couple of days and then see how I feel about it.”
“I think you’d make a great mistake not to take a fresh subject,” said Lester earnestly. “Working over the old one—you’d make it sort of perfunctory and lifeless. You’d better take my advice and tackle something new.”
“Well, I’ll see if any new idea comes to me. But it probably won’t, and I guess the old theme wouldn’t lose much from rewriting. I remember it pretty well.”
“I know, but when you come to writing it all out again, you’ll find it so tedious that you won’t do yourself justice.”
“I’ve got a week, anyway, and I shan’t go at it at once.”
Lester saw no valid ground on which he might pursue the argument. When he entered his room, Richard Bradley turned from the desk at which he was sitting. “Here’s a queer thing, Lester,” he said. “A little while ago I wanted to look up a notice in to-day’s Crimson, and I couldn’t find the sheet anywhere. So I pulled out your waste-basket to see if you’d thrown it in there, and this piece of that theme of Dave’s caught my eye.” He held up the torn piece with David’s name and the name of the course and the date written on the back.
“Isn’t that the limit!” said Lester. He felt that his face was set and that his voice was querulous rather than expressive of astonishment, but he could not dissemble more successfully; the shock of this new discovery was too unkind. “How do you suppose it got there?” He made no effort to take the paper and examine it.