Then there was the time he was invited to a certain annual reception that is always given. The little tutor knew that he was asked only by reason of his position, but he remembered accepting with a good deal of pleasure, and the anticipation of his _entrée_ into the society of the town was a matter of no small excitement to him: a good deal depended on it, he had told himself. He meditated considerably over the manner of conducting himself in his first appearance in society as an instructor: what was becoming to a tutor, and just how dignified he ought to appear, and he even found himself practising remarks in his room and examining in the glass the expression of his face and all those old failings of his self-conscious nature of which he was so ashamed. He remembered how excited he was as he rang the door-bell, and how awkwardly he bowed when he had come down-stairs, and how little the people restrained their curiosity in examining him. He did not mingle with the younger people any more than he could help, for he always hated young ladies, but stayed with a group of women who were talking about Emerson. These ladies were members of a literary club, which thought itself very literary and tried to be Bostonian; and no doubt it was. Stacy had some very good ideas, and would have been willing to express them, and could have quoted readily from an essay he had once written, but somehow they did not seem to be expecting anything from him except to smile and say, "Yes, certainly," now and then, as those two young assistants were doing, and so he tried to pick up a low-toned conversation with one of them on the edge of the circle. But they made themselves so obnoxious by their air of superiority that he boldly made some allusion to the athletic insignificance on the part of their college in comparison with his own. One of them immediately made some answer which brought in something about Yale (at which the other laughed loudly), and then drew up his brow and looked complacent, as if he had made a splendid shot. The poor little tutor turned on his heel furious, and felt a strange desire to swear, something that he had never done in all his innocent life. He came to the conclusion that the fault of this whole matter lay not in himself, but in them. This is what he conceived to be the reason: Nearly everyone in the little city, students, faculty and townspeople, were New Englanders by blood or birth. That part of the country, like other sections of the West, happened to have been settled entirely by New Englanders. Perhaps they were not all of the best sort of New England extraction either. At any rate no one knew anything but New England ways of doing things and looking at things, and to the little tutor, whose environments had not been such as to cause him to bow down and worship the Pilgrim fathers, or to think that the sun rose and set on Plymouth Rock, all this was at first a matter of surprise, then of wonder, and finally of hate.