Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/45

 being schoolboys for the last day in their lives. And answering such silly questions, scratch, scratch, scratch,—inky fingers, leaking brains. Above the scratching he heard summer playing with the shiny Japanese ivy at the windows: summer came right in and molested the printed paper before him; wraith-like melodies echoed in his ears—the Rondes de Printemps—Paris!

"Explain the use of the phrase, 'Saint Nicholas be thy speed!"

The others were explaining it for all they were worth; Grover never would. The English Department, he was thinking, is far more interested in the bard's obsolete suits and trappings than in the part of him that was alleged to be for all time. Why compel the Two Gentlemen of Verona to be for all time? Shakespeare would have been the last to expect it,—with the possible exception of the ditty about Sylvia, which Schubert had rescued. The heavens such grace did le-hend her. Sylvia—Sophie.

All this was even more dismal than the seventeenth century essayists which he had also left to an eleventh hour, and, he felt reasonably sure, flunked. In former years he had been able to drift idyllically within a few days of examinations, then by dint of prodigious cramming, come through creditably, sometimes brilliantly—depending on the professor. He had counted upon being able to get under the skin of the Two Gentlemen and King Lear during the four-day interval between