"So it's a regular campaign, is it?" I demanded.
He evaded the question—but satisfied me with his promise.
But when I heard him break it—heard him, more than any other speaker, launch one smiling epithet after another against the "sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," I lost all the gnawing consciousness that I had had as to the justice of this remark about Jewish sensitiveness—and I went forward to the cart-end from which he was speaking. I meant to pull him down and get up there in his place, and to speak hotly, straight from the shoulder—I didn't care what I said so long as I put them all to disgrace!
But when I was within a few feet of him in the jostling, laughing crowd, I could go no further. I tried to cry out, but that was denied me. My courage gave me only the power to glare and sneer at him—and once, as he spoke, he looked down and saw my face, I think. For his own grew paler in the light of the gas lantern which flared windily beside him, and he faltered in his speech.
Later on he came over to my room and asked to speak to me. I heard him through; listened to his smooth explanation about the committee of arrangements demanding that he put something into his speech about the Jews—and he was sorry he had broken his word to me—only, of course, I was to consider myself an exception to all this sort of thing. Everybody knew I was a good fellow and was doing bully work for the name of the college—and what right had I to class myself with these insignificant little Jews in the Freshman class? and he didn't want it to break up our friendship, because he thought the world of me.
And so I showed him the door.
The next day I began to pay for that stroke of arrogance. The classmates who belonged to that man's fraternity snubbed me on the street.
It didn't matter much, I thought—but in reality, it did. Because these men, as it happened, had been my closest friends. I was beginning to worry myself into a maudlin state, and no doubt did attribute hostility to altogether too many of the undergraduates. But it is hard to choose and distinguish surely in a land that is generally hostile and strange. I began to stay more and more within the shelter of my room, working at my studies and at those activities which had already given me recognition. I wanted to be plucky about it. I wanted to keep on smiling—but there were times, I must confess, when I wished that I were through with college and all its rough-and-tumble boyishness.
I did not care so much myself. There were all these freshmen who were probably ten times lonelier than I was, ten times more bewildered and disheartened by the welcome they had had. I tried to visit as many of them as lived in dormitories. I wanted to talk things over with them, to help them in some possible way. But it wasn't much of a success—I could make no progress out of condonement and asking them to wait patiently until the foolish campaign had dwindled away.
Then, one day, as I crossed the campus to a first recitation, I saw that the brick walls of the oldest of the dormitories had been adorned with huge painted letters: