“We cannot judge each other, Quincy. That would be as unfair, one way as the other. I do not understand. But I have stopped questioning. We can spare one another that. And without tangling one another further, we can go on, solving our lives.”
He stopped; and stepping back, surveyed the boy. “You will not misunderstand the spirit in which I have received you. Do not turn your back on anything—on me, for instance, or on her. Be a man. Now go.”
He spoke with a gigantic effort. And now, he held out his hand.
Quincy looked at it. He leaned back rigidly against the easy path of taking it.
“Professor,” he said, “I cannot take your hand.”
The hand dropped back to the Professor’s side. A flash of anger went before a cloud of pain. Both of these Quincy saw on his face. And then, after a silence, Mr. Deering spoke:
“Mr. Burt,” he said, “your impulse in being unwilling to take my hand, since you were willing to come to me—I confess—I cannot understand it. It is due either to weakness or to a worse thing. You have disappointed me,—for the first time.... Think it over. And come back to me, when you can take my hand.” He walked toward the door, and, flinging it open—: “Good-bye,” he said.
So Quincy went away.
Such were the auspices of junior year.
Everything seemed gone which he had so bravely builded up. Eighteen years it had taken him to gain a vantage point in life, to breathe life’s air without pain and meet life’s onslaught with a kind of joy. And then, after one brief excursion, everything had collapsed, everything had died; and only he remained—he, the eternal constant, but bruised and shrunken and stripped of even the glimmer of understanding. What had been wrong with him? What false fire had this been, making his warmth and his vision?