It was rather late when we arrived, and the room was crowded with fellows, very few of whom I had ever seen before. Fleetwood opened the door for us, with a Shakespearian quotation trembling aptly on his lips, and led us through the crowd to his inside room, where we left our coats and hats.
"You must come and meet my lions and hear them roar," Fleetwood said to us; and was about to take us across the study to where Duggie was standing against the wall with a semicircle of Freshmen in front of him drinking in his every word.
"Good gracious, man—you don't mean to say you got me away over here on a cold night to hear Duggie Sherwin drool about football," Berri exclaimed to me. Mr. Fleetwood laughed, and seemed to think this was very funny.
"Just look how glad of the chance all those others are, you unappreciative boy," he said reproachfully to Berri.
"Oh, well—he doesn't wake them up at a horrible hour every morning yelling like a fiend under a shower-bath," Berri explained. "You see, the lion and I occupy the same lair—or do lions live in a den? I never can remember."
"Perhaps Mr. Ranny knows," said Fleetwood to a tall, studious-looking fellow who had evidently planned his escape and was in the act of shyly carrying it out when Fleetwood detained him. Fleetwood introduced him to Berri and slid away to greet another man who had just opened the door. As I moved off to join Duggie's group, Berri gave me a queer look; but a few minutes later I happened to glance across at him, and as the tall fellow was laughing at everything Berri said I knew that Berri was enjoying himself.
Duggie shook hands with me and said good-evening just as if he had n't been in my room sprawling on the floor in front of the fire an hour and a half before, and then went on with what he was saying to the fellows nearest him—some polite looking little chaps; Freshmen, although I had never seen them before.
The talk was mostly about football; the games that had been played and the ones still to come—comparative scores and the merits and defects of players at other colleges. Of course Duggie could discuss only with the fellows just in front of him. I think he realized how embarrassing it would be to any of the others if he were to single them out and address remarks to them. Besides, it might have sounded patronizing. Yet every now and then, when whoever was talking happened to say something funny, Duggie somehow included the whole crowd in the laugh that followed. I think he managed it by catching everybody's eye at just the right time; I know that—although I was merely standing there looking on—whenever he caught mine, I felt as if I were right in the game. This often had the effect of causing a fellow to say something to the fellow next to him, and so it frequently happened that people who had joined the group merely to rubber in embarrassed silence at Duggie, found themselves making acquaintances and talking on their own account. I learned afterward that this was precisely what Fleetwood and Duggie counted on. It was Fleetwood's chief reason for having Duggie as often as he could at his Wednesday Evenings, and Duggie's only reason for going.
Across the room there was another centre of attraction in the person of a fine but rather pompous-looking old gentleman with a pink face and a snowy beard. His audience was more talkative than Duggie's, but not so large. It was n't composed entirely of Freshmen, either. As I was standing there making up my mind to slide through the intervening crowd and find out what he was talking about, Berri, who had been standing with a rapt expression on the outskirts of the second group, detached himself and came over to me. "You simply must come and listen to him; it's perfectly thrilling," he said.
"I was just going over to investigate," I answered. "What 's his specialty?"