Sylvia was touched by his tone, and she tried again to explain. “It isn’t that you keep to yourself,” she said. “You cultivate a contempt for your classmates, and they reply with hatred and envy, and so you break up college life. It’s true, isn’t it, that there’s a struggle going on now?”
“The class elections, you mean?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. So much bitterness and intriguing, because you keep to yourself! Why do you come to college at all? Surely you won’t say it’s the professors and the studies!”
“No,” said he, smiling in spite of himself.
“You come, and you make yourself into a kind of idol. Excuse me, if it isn’t polite, but what I said the other night is the truth—the Golden Calf! And what I say is, try the other plan a while. Stop thinking about yourself, and what they are thinking about you—above all, what they are thinking about your money. They won’t all be thinking about your money.”
He did not answer promptly. “Apparently,” she said, “you don’t feel quite sure. If you can’t, I know several real men that I could introduce you to—men right in your own class.”
“Who are they?”
She hesitated. She was about to say Frank Shirley, but concluded not to. “I met one the other day—he doesn’t belong to a club, yet he’s the most interesting person I’ve encountered here. He talked about you, and he wasn’t complimentary; but if you sought him out in the right way, and made it clear you weren’t trying to patronize him, I’m sure he’d be a friend.”
“What’s his name?”
“Mr. Firmin.”