This Side of Paradise

"He's way over their heads--you know you think so yourself when you talk to him--Good Lord, Tom, you used to stand out against 'people.' Success has completely conventionalized you."

Tom grew rather annoyed.

"What's he trying to do--be excessively holy?"

"No! not like anybody you've ever seen. Never enters the Philadelphian Society. He has no faith in that rot. He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it."

"He certainly is getting in wrong."

"Have you talked to him lately?"

"No."

"Then you haven't any conception of him."

The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how the sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.

"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class--I mean they're the best-educated men in college--the editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on--the Pharisee class--Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully."

The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a recitation.

"Whither bound, Tsar?"

"Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby," he waved a copy of the morning's Princetonian at Amory. "He wrote this editorial."

"Going to flay him alive?"

"No--but he's got me all balled up. Either I've misjudged him or he's suddenly become the world's worst radical."

Burne hurried on, and it was several days before Amory heard an account of the ensuing conversation. Burne had come into the editor's sanctum displaying the paper cheerfully.

"Hello, Jesse."

"Hello there, Savonarola."

"I just read your editorial."

"Good boy--didn't know you stooped that low."

"Jesse, you startled me."

"How so?"

"Aren't you afraid the faculty'll get after you if you pull this irreligious stuff?"

"What?"

"Like this morning."

"What the devil--that editorial was on the coaching system."

"Yes, but that quotation--"

Jesse sat up.

"What quotation?"

"You know: 'He who is not with me is against me.'"

"Well--what about it?"

Jesse was puzzled but not alarmed.

"Well, you say here--let me see." Burne opened the paper and read: "'He who is not with me is against me, as that gentleman said who was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and puerile generalities.'"