My aunt, who had undoubtedly had to listen to these catchwords as often as any other Jew or Jewess must, attempted not to understand why Mrs. Van Brunt had spoken them. A few minutes later she made a few unblinking and pointed remarks about having to attend a convention of Christian Science workers in the fall--as if to protest that Mrs. Van Brunt had made a grievous and embarrassing error. I asked my aunt, a few days later, if I was not to be allowed to live in one of the university dormitories. Whether or not his college is in his home town, every boy wants the full flavor of undergraduate life--wants to live on the campus, to throw himself heart and soul into the college games and customs. I could not see how college would mean anything to me if I were to go on living at home in that dull, comfortless apartment of Aunt Selina's. Youth is always eager for emancipation--always a little too thoughtless in its eagerness. Perhaps I was wrong in forgetting what I owed Aunt Selina. She took great offense at my wish. She spoke, her voice choked with tears, of the many years that she had cared for me, fostered me, guarded me from a world of foreign things--"ruffians and kikes and niggers," was the way she described it. At any rate, I remember that I spent a whole day in thinking it out for myself upon a lonely walk, and that, at the end of it, I came to tell her that she was right and that I was ashamed of wanting to leave her--that I would live home with her, and try to gain the best of college in that way. Privately, I knew that I could never gain as much--but I had made up my mind not to pain her, confident that it would be worth the sacrifice. The days lagged slowly to the end of that summer. I was preparing in a hundred little ways for the great adventure: sending for all sorts of stereotyped books on the moral conduct of college men, on the art of making friends, on the history and traditions of my university. I was prepared to be its most loyal son. I could hardly wait for the stupid weeks at this mountain hotel to pass by, for the opening day to arrive. And then, when the trees were beginning to fleck with scarlet and the summer heather streaked with goldenrod, we did depart for the city. It was only a week before college would begin. Then five days, four days, three, two, one. And on the night before registration day, which would commence the college year, I sat for a long while at my table-desk, dreaming high things--hope and fear mingling with my dreams, charging them with an exquisite uncertainty, making them pulse with the things that were innermost in me.