I don't think anybody could read Duggie's letter and not feel that it was for the best. Berri has n't said anything more about it, and neither have I. There really is n't anything to say.
I passed all my exams. My marks are n't anything to be stuck up about, but they let me through decently, and in three courses were even a little better than they actually had to be,—which is a comfort in a way. For my adviser says he thinks that in a few weeks it would n't do any harm to petition the administrative board (or whatever it is that has charge of such things) to let me off probation. He says he can't promise anything, of course, but that stranger things have happened; all of which seems to me rather to explode Berri's conviction that every adviser in college spends all his odd moments in devising fiendish schemes for the destruction of his Freshmen charges. But then Berri was unfortunate in his adviser. He is n't young and does n't try to be sympathetic like mine, and he annoys Berri extremely by glaring at him over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and exclaiming à propos of nothing,—
"You can't fool me—you can't fool me!"
My adviser has had me to dinner twice at the professors' club. He invites his Freshmen, four or five at a time, to dinner, in order, I suppose, to get to know them better. Of course, he never really does get to know us better by having these stiff little parties, but it's awfully kind of him to ask us, and he thinks he does; so it's all right. I dreaded the first one, but my dread was n't a patch on the dread with which I dreaded the second, because I 'd been to the first. Naturally I did n't dare refuse to go to either of them. Nobody does. The dinner itself is good, and my adviser not only lays himself out to be just as nice as possible,—he succeeds. Yet the fellows don't feel altogether at their ease somehow and are n't themselves. They want to be and try to be, and once in a while they put up a pretty good bluff at it, but they never quite are. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but when you can't help feeling that your host is sizing you up and talking only about the things he thinks you like to talk about—even if you do like to talk about them, why, you just can't. (I've read that sentence over six times and it means a little less every time.) After dinner he takes the fellows up to his room and asks them to smoke, and they never know which would be the better swipe,—to accept or to refuse. Some decide one way and some the other; but whether they want to smoke or not has very little to do with the decision. The best part of the evening comes when somebody gets up enough nerve to murmur that he is very sorry he has to say good-night, as he has a lot of studying to do. This usually makes the others laugh, and it always breaks up the party. Then the fellows get together in somebody's room—if they know one another well enough—and talk the thing over.
Oh, I wish spring would come! This seems to be the time of year when nothing much happens. As long as we were all grinding most of the day for the mid-years, I didn't think much about the weather, except that when it was bad there wasn't so much temptation to idle out of doors. Now, however, everybody wants the weather to be good, and it's vile. It always manages to do four or five different things in the course of a day, and the walking is unspeakable. To a certain extent, though, this is the fault of the town itself. Most of the residence streets have dirt sidewalks and curbstones that might be very picturesque in Egypt or some place where it did n't rain and snow and freeze and melt all in the course of a few hours; but here they turn into troughs full of mud and slush, and the curbstones keep the mixture from running into the gutter. I know I ought n't to criticise such a fine old town. So many great people have, all their lives, floundered uncomplainingly through Cambridge mud that I suppose it's cheeky of me to notice it. But in wet weather the sidewalks are really not nice. In front of a few houses the owners put down temporary wooden walks,—three boards wide, running lengthwise,—but you invariably meet a lady in the middle of them and have to jump gracefully into the nearest puddle, looking as if you considered this the dearest privilege of your young life.
The candidates for the track team are crazy to get out of doors and begin regular practice on the Soldiers' Field cinder track, but it 's too soft yet to be raked and rolled, and they have to keep working in the gym and on the tiresome old board track behind it. Dick Smith was talking about this not long ago when he joined me in the Yard. He says it's great on a warm spring morning to go across the river and sit on the bleachers and watch the fellows practise starting and short sprints.
Well, there's nothing like that now. I hardly know how the days go by.
XVI
I notice that when I last wrote in my diary I was wishing for spring, and here it is almost the end of June! Where did all those slow days I complained of go to so quickly, I wonder? How did I spend them, and why haven't I tried to tell about them? I don't know unless it was because they were so slow and did go so quickly. Nothing ever happened, really, until just at the end; but to-day with Cambridge sizzling hot (I can smell the asphalt on the main street even here in my room) and perfectly deserted, except for its inhabitants (who don't count) and the kids who have come to take their entrance exams, the last three months and a half seem like a dream. The spring is scarcely over, and yet I 've already begun to look forward to it again next year.
I liked it so much, I suppose, because in Perugia we don't, as a rule, have any. Out there it's very much like what you read about Russia: for a long time it's winter, and then you wake up some morning feeling as if you had spent the night in a Turkish bath, and know that it is summer; you know that the soda-fountains are hissing, that a watering-cart is jolting past, leaving behind it a damp, earthy sensation (something between an odor and a faint breeze), that an Italian is leaning over the fence languidly calling out, "Bananos—bananos," that a scissors-grinder is ding-donging in the distance, and that, of course, a lawn-mower is whirring sharply back and forth under your windows.