I soon distanced all rivals. Peck was quickly disposed of; though, with his nagging persistence, he still held on. This bored me exceedingly and her too, if I could judge by her ridicule of him and her sarcasm which he somehow appeared too stupid to see. He succumbed, however, to my mimicry of his dancing; for I was a good mimic, and Peck, in a very high collar and with very short trousers on his dumpy legs, was really a fair mark. Miss Poole was by no means indifferent to public opinion, and a shaft of satire could penetrate her mail of complacency. So when she returned later to the classic shades of the university, as she did a number of times for Germans and other social functions, I made a good deal of hay. A phrase of Peck's, apropos of this, stuck in my memory. Some one--it was, I think, Leo Wolffert--said that I appeared to be making hay, and Peck said, "Yes, I would be eating it some day." I often wondered afterward how he stumbled on the witticism. Those visits of my tall young dulcinea cost me dear in the sequel. While the other fellows were boning I was lounging in the drawing-room chattering nonsense or in the shade of the big trees in some secluded nook, writing her very warm poems of the character which Horace says is hated both of Gods and men. Several of these poems were published in the college magazine. The constant allusions to her physical charms caused Peck to say that I evidently considered Miss Poole to be "composed wholly of eyes and hair." His observation that a man was a fool to write silly verses to a girl he loved, because it gave her a wrong idea of her charms, I, at the time, set down to sheer envy, for Peck could not turn a rhyme; but since I have discovered that for a practical person like Peck, it has a foundation, of truth. V THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE Meantime, my studies--if any part of my desultory occupation could be so termed--suffered undeniably. My appearance at the classroom door with a cigarette, which I flung away just in time not to carry it into the room, together with my chronic excuse of being "unprepared," moved the driest of my professors to the witticism that I "divided my time between a smoke and a flame." It was only as the finals drew near that I began to appreciate that I would have the least trouble in "making my tickets," as the phrase went. Sam Pleasants, Leo Wolffert and my other friends had begun to be anxious for me for some time before--and both Wolffert and John Marvel had come to me and suggested my working, at least, a little: Wolffert with delicacy and warmth; John Marvel with that awkward bluntness with which he always went at anything. I felt perfectly easy in my mind then and met their entreaties scornfully. "Why, I did well enough at the Intermediates," I said. "Yes, but," said John Marvel, "Delilah was not here then----"