"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"?'