r for emancipation--always a little too thoughtless
in its eagerness.

Perhaps I was wrong in forgetting what I owed Aunt Selina. She took
great offense at my wish. She spoke, her voice choked with tears, of the
many years that she had cared for me, fostered me, guarded me from a
world of foreign things--"ruffians and kikes and niggers," was the way
she described it.

At any rate, I remember that I spent a whole day in thinking it out for
myself upon a lonely walk, and that, at the end of it, I came to tell
her that she was right and that I was ashamed of wanting to leave
her--that I would live home with her, and try to gain the best of
college in that way. Privately, I knew that I could never gain as
much--but I had made up my mind not to pain her, confident that it would
be worth the sacrifice.

The days lagged slowly to the end of that summer. I was preparing in a
hundred little ways for the great adventure: sending for all sorts of
stereotyped books on the moral conduct of college men, on the art of
making friends, on the history and traditions of my university. I was
prepared to be its most loyal son. I could hardly wait for the stupid
weeks at this mountain hotel to pass by, for the opening day to arrive.

And then, when the trees were beginning to fleck with scarlet and the
summer heather streaked with goldenrod, we did depart for the city. It
was only a week before college would begin.

Then five days, four days, three, two, one. And on the night before
registration day, which would commence the college year, I sat for a
long while at my table-desk, dreaming high things--hope and fear
mingling with my dreams, charging them with an exquisite uncertainty,
making them pulse with the things that were innermost in me.

I was old enough, I thought, to review all the past--to see myself with
youth's over-harsh criticism of itself--to realize that, so far, I had
made a miserable, cringing, cowardly botch of my conduct and
convictions. Some day, soon, I seemed to feel, there would come a moment
of crisis--a moment when all the shy, stammering manhood that I knew to
be in my heart would fling itself suddenly into the open and make me
strong and confident, helpful to myself and many others. I had always
longed to be a leader--as every boy does--and so far I had been a
slave--slave, most abjectly of all, to my own fears and prejudices. But
it would be different at college: there would be something--I did not
know wha