But when I was back at the hotel, I went straightway to my room and opened the envelope, stripped out the blue, bank-note sheet and read--yes, I had passed every examination. And I was a regularly enrolled student at the university. I told my aunt of it at lunch, as if it were a casual thing--and she treated it as such, too. If I had had any doubts of her lack of genuine interest in me, I knew it now for certain. It was just a matter of course to her--this entrance into college--and to me, in turn, it meant so much: a new work, a new land, a life entirely new and shot through with hopes. I did not tell her that, but let her change the topic quickly. She was intent upon talking fashions with Mrs. Fleming-Cohen. I had hated to come to this hotel for another year. The people persisted in making things graciously unpleasant for us. I was beginning to be old enough to feel it keenly--and not old enough to overlook. I wonder, for that matter, if Jews are ever old enough to overlook it? But Aunt Selina was dictatress of my destinies. She had declared I must either come along to the hotel or else I would not be allowed to enter college. In the face of such an alternative I had yielded quickly. But there had already begun between my aunt and me a chasm that grew daily wider, deeper, more hopelessly incapable of bridging. When one has been away for a year, one returns to find grim truths. I had met other people, seen other lives and other souls since I had been in boarding school: I was not clouded now by my blood relationship to Mrs. Haberman or by day after day of close but unintimate companionship. I saw her as she was: a shallow, flighty woman whose thoughts were always upon that sort of society which spells itself with a capital S, whose petulance found no ease--always restless, always ambitious for petty things, wanting only what she could not have--an idle woman, foolish in her idleness. In spite of her taking it as a matter of course, she spent the whole day, after she had learned my news, in spreading it about the porch and parlors of the hotel. She seemed to imagine that it would interest every one--even Mrs. Van Brunt, the arbiter of elegance of the mountain clique, who, on hearing it, sniffed, patted her lorgnette with a lace handkerchief, and inquired if a great many Jews did not attend this particular university. "Really, I should not think of sending any relative of mine there," she sniffed. "Not that I have a prejudice against Jews, of course--in fact, I consider myself very democratic. I have many Jewish acquaintances. Many of my best friends are Jews."