You can’t talk to a college man about himself, when his career is a pleasanter one than your own, because--well, because you mustn’t. And you can’t talk to a man who is to you an unknown quantity,--a nonentity, a cipher,--simply because you can’t. It’s all very distressing, and you talk about athletics. But in the month of March the effort is transparent and a bore. Neither football nor base-ball is contemporaneous; the crew is still rather vague; and when you plunge recklessly into track athletics, it occurs to you, all at once, that you haven’t taken the trouble to go near any since your freshman year. It’s impossible, therefore, to recall whether Spavins is the person who ran the hurdles in sixteen, or reached incredible heights in the pole vault; it is even likely that Spavins did neither, and was all the time behind the bleachers absorbed in putting the shot. To tell the truth, you don’t know Spavins; you have never met him; you never will, and you always skip the column in the “Crimson” that records his exploits. This was the basis on which Hewitt and Bradley finished their talk. The peculiar occasion of their being in the same room together was at an end. Bradley lingered merely because an innate sense of proportion kept him there; to leave the minute you say the only thing you came to say, is like running out of church before the people all round you are done confiding things to the backs of the pews in front of them. Your devotions only properly cease when the subdued spontaneous exertion of stout women regaining the perpendicular gives you the signal. Bradley was waiting for the signal. The bell on Harvard Hall, calling students to the last lecture of the day, sounded it. “There goes the bell; I must hurry along,” he said, fingering the note-book he had brought with him. “Oh, cut your lecture!” came from Horace rather eagerly. Bradley looked up in surprise. His face was not well fashioned for concealing what went on in his head. Just now it distinctly said, “How extraordinary! Why should I cut my lecture?” His words, however, were, “Oh, no, thank you; I must run along!” He took another cigarette to smoke on the way over to the Yard, and sauntered round the room, although he mentioned more than once his fear of being late. At the door, he turned to say, “Well, good-bye; I hope you know how much obliged I am to you for all that.” “There isn’t anything really. Good-bye.” Horace assisted at the opening and shutting of the door, in the unnecessary way one does with strangers. Then he walked slowly up and down his study, with his hands in his pockets, whistling energetically under his breath, and stopping every now and then to stare out of the window. Curtiss came in almost immediately.