m teaching again. If they send you back, if they say I’ve got to have you in my class, I quit. Do you hear me, Jones?” he shouted. “I’ll not have you! If they try to force me, I’m through! To hell with such a life! I’ll get down and clean out sewers before I have you in my class again…. Now, you damned rascal,” his voice had grown so hoarse and thick he could hardly speak, and the blind motes were swimming drunkenly before him. “… I’ve had all I can stand from you…. Why, you damned dull fellow…. Sitting there and sneering at me day after day with your damned Jew’s face…. What are you but a damned dull fellow, anyway?… Why, damn you, Jones, you didn’t deserve anyone like me…. You should get down on your knees and thank God you had a teacher half as good as me…. You… damned… fellow…. You!… To think I sweat blood over you!… Now, get away from here!”… he yelled. “To hell with you!… I never want to see your face again!”
He turned and started toward the hotel entrance: he felt blind and weak and dizzy, but he did not care what happened now: after all these weeks of heavy misery a great wave of release and freedom was coursing through his veins. Before he had gone three steps Abe Jones was at his side, clutching at his sleeve, beseeching, begging, pleading: “Say!… You’ve got the wrong idea! Honest you have!… Say! I never knew you felt like that! Don’t send me out of there,” he begged earnestly, and suddenly Eugene saw that his shining glasses had grown misty and that his dull weak eyes blinked with tears. “I don’t want to leave your class,” he said. “Why, that’s the best class that I’ve got!… Honest it is! No kiddin’!… All the fellows feel the same way about it.”
He begged, beseeched, and almost wept: finally, when good will had again been restored between them, he wrung Eugene’s hand, laughed painfully and shyly, and then took off his misted glasses and began to shine and polish them with a handkerchief. His grey ugly face as he stood there polishing his glasses had that curiously naked, inept, faded and tired wistful look that is common to people with weak eyes when they remove their spectacles; it was a good and ugly face, and suddenly Eugene began to like Abe very much. He left him and went up to his room with a feeling of such relief, ease and happiness as he had not known for months; and that night, unhaunted, unashamed, unpursued by fears and furies and visions of his ruin and failure for the first time in many months, he sank dreamlessly, sweetly, deliriously, into the depths of a profound and soundless sleep.
