"Well, I know that," Fleetwood replied a trifle sharply. He was inclined to be "peevish," Berri said, because the morning papers had n't been delivered.
"But I want to tell you how sorry I am," Berri added; the situation was much worse, Berri says, than it would have been if Fleetwood had seemed more impressed by his dishonesty. As a matter of fact, Fleetwood merely smiled.
"Oh, I never had the vaguest idea that you would write it," he remarked airily. "But if you don't care, I don't. It's much easier for me to give you an E for having failed to hand it in, than it is to read fifty or sixty pages of your impossible writing."
At this Berri said he almost reeled from his chair.
"Did n't I hand it in?" he asked, while his heart thumped painfully. Fleetwood glanced up from his oatmeal only long enough to say,—
"I wish you would go some place else to eat; you bother me." But Berri insisted.
"Dear Mr. Fleetwood," he pleaded eagerly, "please answer me just that one thing. Did n't you find my thesis pushed through your door?" At this Fleetwood put his hands to his head, as he always does when he 's pretending that we 're trying to drive him mad, and moaned,—
"First you tell me you have n't written your thesis and then you ask me if I 've picked it up on my floor. Oh, go away, go away! I shall never be able to finish my breakfast and get back through all that ghastly snow to my ten-o'clock lecture." Then Berri dashed out, forgetting to pay for his breakfast, and came to find me.
Fleetwood must think that Berri isn't quite right; for he followed the instructor around all day more or less, waiting for him at the doors of lecture halls, intercepting him in front of the Colonial Club at lunch-time, running after him in the Square, and calling on him twice at his room, to ask if the thesis had turned up yet. But of course it never had. At that time neither of us could account for its disappearance, and Berri can't yet. He is existing in a state of nervous dread for fear it "may have fallen behind something" in the dark vestibule and will eventually turn up. Well, it will turn up, but not in Fleetwood's room.
Berri spent most of the time in which he wasn't dogging Fleetwood's footsteps discussing the thing with me. But I could n't help him much beyond hoping that the thesis—like the love-letter or the lost will in dramas at the Bowdoin Square Theatre—wouldn't be found until the fifth act, after an elapse of twenty years.