Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/219



September, 1900.

first weeks of Freshman year were like a return to the formless impersonality of little boyhood. Just as Neale had felt himself an amœba-like cell among the finished, many-membered adults of his parents' circle, so he was now again only one more wriggle in the mass of Freshmen. Nobody could tell him apart from any other Freshman. He could scarcely tell himself apart from the other Freshmen.

This did not afflict him as it might a more sensitive, self-conscious boy. Indeed he rather enjoyed the anonymity of his condition, the space and vacuum about him which it created, where he floated free from any threat of the handling or pawing-over which was his especial fear when he entered into relations with other people. There was so much that was new to him in college life that it was occupation enough to look on without taking any part. He enjoyed the variety of his experiences, from the Greek-and-Roman feeling that came with walking up the Library steps, to the fairy-cave enchantment of floating on the shimmering water of the electric-lighted, marble-lined swimming pool. And he enjoyed most of all his aloof spectator's scorn of footless classes like Rhetoric A, or class-meetings where a few loud-mouthed blow-hards ran the show, while the real scouts like himself preserved a cautious, sardonic silence. He discovered the perilous secret, always a temptation to natures like his, that if you attempt nothing, share in no effort, you are automatically freed from any blame for the inevitable foolishness and blunders; you can stand on your safe little hillock and scorn the poor fools who try to do things and fail. The lone-wolf motive sang seductively in his seventeen-year-old ears. Nothing in any of his classes, nothing in the Library or in any of the books