ground; I
had helped in the development of a roof-garden cordiality between the
settlement workers and the mothers of children on the street. Mr.
Richards, the last night I was there, presented me with a loving-cup on
behalf of the other workers.

It was at supper that he did this, in front of them all. He called upon
me, then, to describe to them the most interesting experience I had had
in the course of the summer. So I told them the incident of Frank Cohen
and his mother--but I do not think they saw much that was interesting
about it. Mr. Richards may have, perhaps, because he must have
remembered that dictum of his which the incident disproved; but even he
could guess little of the impression it had made upon my thought and
character.

I had had a letter from my Aunt Selina, to tell me curtly that she was
back in New York, but intended starting out immediately upon an
automobile tour through New England into Canada, in company with Mrs.
Fleming-Cohen and some ship-board acquaintances--"personages," she
called them in her much underlined letter, which probably meant that she
had succeeded in capturing some stray society folk. She bade me go back
to our apartment and to have it ready for her on her return. The
servants, she said, were already there, engaged in cleaning away the
summer's dust. She hoped "I would be able to start the college year
without her, and that I would comport myself on the campus in a manner
creditable and befitting, etc., etc."

But in spite of the servants' efforts to make things bright and
comfortable, the apartment was a dismal and lonely place. College kept
me uptown all day long, of course, but when the evening came and I must
return to the big, empty rooms that were our substitute for home, I did
not like it. I began to linger more and more about the campus at night:
it was truly the most beautiful time to be there, when the autumn moon
silvered its lawns and gave the buildings a marble whiteness. There was
singing on the fences, then, and all sorts of meetings of all kinds of
college organizations. The campus hummed with a hundred undergraduate
activities--so that I saw, as never before, how much I missed through
having to go downtown each night to live. But so long as my aunt wanted
it, I felt I owed it to her to obey, and would not even consider the
renting of Trevelyan's suite of rooms in the principal dormitory.
Trevelyan had given up these rooms to move into his fraternity house.