Newbold said, “Oh, no!” but he felt very tired indeed. His feet ached horribly and his head felt hot and dizzy, and there were queer, sharp pains shooting through his body which made him think forebodingly of pneumonia. “The surprise is ready--Miss Atterbury is going to have the crew out for your especial benefit!” went on Miss Yale, triumphantly. “Don’t you feel complimented? And you are to pull Miss Thayer and myself about while they go through a little practice for you. Not much, you know, but just enough to show you the stroke and speed we get. The boat is a beauty--but then, of course, you know so much more about it than we do! I imagine from your article that you must pull an oar capitally. Miss Thayer says a cat-boat is your especial hobby, though.” “Did Miss Thayer say that?” began Newbold, hotly. “Beastly things, I think--hate ’em!” Miss Yale smiled incredulously and brightly at him. “How modest you are!” she said, admiringly. “Ah! there is Miss Atterbury!” Newbold saw some one waving frantically at them. “Come on!” exclaimed Miss Yale; “we want to see them start off--that’s the best part.” Newbold never remembered afterward how he got across the intervening space, or how he got into a boat with the two young women. The first thing he heard was Miss Atterbury asking him anxiously how he liked the new sliding-seats, and what he thought of the proportions of the boat, and about outriggers in general, and where he thought they could be built best and cheapest. Newbold felt about as capable of instructing her on such points as of judging the pictures at a Salon exhibit, and he longed, with a longing born of utter exhaustion and desperation, to get away. As he wearily pulled the heavy, unwieldy boat about after the light practice-barge, which kept an appalling distance ahead of him, he decided within himself that the physical development of women had been carried to an absurd and alarming extent, and that men simply were not in it with them when it came to endurance and enthusiasm, and that he had made the mistake of his life when he wrote that article on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that his chief might talk until he was blue in the face before he would ever consent again to write about anything of which he knew so little. They were very disappointed when he told them firmly that he could not stay to dinner or to the concert, but that he had a pressing engagement that would take him back to the city. And they said that there were still the Swedish gymnastics and basket-ball and pole-vaulting to see, and that they were afraid he had not enjoyed himself or he would have got rid of that engagement in some way; but he assured them impressively that he had never spent a more instructive or peculiarly interesting afternoon in his life.