"Good gracious, man! where did you get this? You must n't go to the theatre looking that way. Just because Bernhardt plays Hamlet is no reason why you should undertake to do Ophelia;" and then he threw it on the floor. Fleetwood rolled his eyes hopelessly.

Well, we never got home until almost four in the morning. A man whose seat was behind ours at the play tapped Fleetwood on the shoulder as soon as we had sat down, and after a whispered conversation he got up and went away. Then Fleetwood told us the man was a dramatic critic—an acquaintance of his—who had been sent to write up the play for a morning paper, but that, as he did n't understand French and was n't much of a Shakespearian scholar and wanted to go to a progressive peanut party in West Roxbury anyhow, he had asked Fleetwood to do the thing for him. Fleetwood used to be on a paper himself, and was delighted to renew old times.

So all during the performance he made notes on the margin of his program and chuckled to himself. The occupation, I think, diverted his mind from Berri and me and helped him to forgive us.

Afterward we went to Newspaper Row and waited for hours in a bare, rather dirty little room while Fleetwood, standing at a high desk under an electric light in the corner, wrote his review. He spent much more time in groaning, "My facility is gone—my hand has lost its cunning," than in actual writing. By the time he was ready to leave we were all famished; so before catching the owl car from Bowdoin Square we stopped at an all-night restaurant that Fleetwood used to patronize when he was a reporter, and had buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. I 've never tasted anything so good.

The Cambridge car was interesting, but fearful. It was jammed with people, and I wondered where so many could have come from that hour of the morning. They could n't all have been dramatic critics. The majority of those who got seats went sound asleep, and as the conductor could n't very well wake them up at every street, he found out beforehand where they wanted to get off, and then hung little tags on their coats that told their destination.

When we were saying good-by to Fleetwood in the Square, Berri laughed and asked,—

"Have you decided yet what you 're going to do to me, Mr. Fleetwood? I know you would like to give me E on my thesis, but I don't think I deserve quite that." Instead of answering him, however, Mr. Fleetwood ran away, exclaiming,—

"Don't talk shop,—don't talk shop; good-night,—good-night!"

Berri has begun to get awfully scared about the thesis,—not that he's afraid that Fleetwood will give it a low mark, but because it does n't look at present as if there would be anything to mark at all. I found him in his room the other day with a pile of books and a scratch-block on his table. But he had n't taken a note, and his attitude was one of utter despair. Of course he can't possibly write it unless he stays here during the holidays, for they begin day after to-morrow.

XI