The summer came to an end only too quickly. I had enjoyed every moment of it, every opportunity. I had built up three clubs of which I was personal leader; I had given service in the gymnasium and playground; 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.
"It's a dreadful bore," he said to me in his lazy, rueful way. "I'd be ten times more comfortable here—but I don't want to insult the brothers. However, you'll come up to the house and see me just as often, won't you?"
I promised him I would, but he seemed to know as well as I that I would not. A sophomore paying nightly visits to a senior in the fraternity house where that sophomore had only a year ago been smiled politely out—no, it didn't seem even probable. And so, when I had helped Trevelyan put his last bit of furniture upon a truck—and had tucked among the rungs of many Morris chairs the bundle of flags and college shields which he had overlooked—I could hardly bear to shake hands with him. We both knew that it was something in the nature of a definite goodbye; at any rate, so far as college was concerned.
"A damned nuisance, this," he said thickly, his short-sighted eyes screwing up oddly. "And if it wasn't for the brothers—" But the brothers did win him, and I lost a friend thereby.
The home to which I must go seemed lonelier than ever now. I was not expecting Aunt Selina for two more weeks, and so I hit upon the idea of inviting some one to stay with me until then.
Frank Cohen! Yes, I would ask Frank Cohen. He was going to high school now, and the branch which he attended was not so far from where I lived. It would be convenient for him, and perhaps a happy change from the East Side crowdedness which he had had to encounter all his life.
He was as glad to come as I to have him. I gave him Aunt Selina's room to sleep in, and we sat there, when our homework was done, many evenings until past midnight, talking gently and thoughtfully of many things. He was a boy much as I had been—and perhaps, still was. He was shy to an uncomfortable degree, low of voice, dreamy in manner. But when he was aroused to something especial, he became uncontrollably intense, his eyes flashing and his knees trembling, so that his whole small body seemed but the sheer vibration of his thoughts.