softly, painfully, he laughed. “Say, this is rich!” and gleefully he would read his answer: five closely typed pages of bitter insult and vituperation.
Another astonishing and disquieting circumstance of this brutal correspondence was now revealed: this extraordinary “friend” of Abe’s, who wrote him these insulting letters, had not gone abroad, nor did he live in some remote and distant city. When Eugene asked Abe where this savage critic lived, he answered: “Oh, a couple of blocks from where I live.”
“But do you ever see him?”
“Sure. Why not?” he said, looking at Eugene in a puzzled way. “We grew up together. I see him all the time.”
“And yet you write this fellow letters and he writes you, when you live only a block apart and see each other all the time?”
“Sure. Why not?” said Abe.
He saw nothing curious or unusual in the circumstance, and yet there was something disturbing and unpleasant about it: in all these letters Eugene had observed, below the tirades of abuse, an obscure, indefinable, and murky emotionalism that was somehow ugly.
Within a few months, however, this strange communication with his Jewish comrade ceased abruptly: Eugene began to see Abe, in the halls and corridors of the university, squiring various Jewish girls around with a sheepish and melancholy look. His lust for letter-writing still raged with unabated violence, although now the subjects of his correspondence were women. His attitude towards girls had always been cold and scornful: he regarded their cajoleries and enticements with a fishy eye and with a vast Jewish caution and suspiciousness, and he laughed scornfully at anyone who allowed himself to be ensnared. Like many people who feel deeply, and who are powerfully affected by the slightest and remotest changes in their emotions, he had convinced himself that he was a creature whose every action was governed by the operations of cool reason, and accordingly now that his feelings were powerfully and romantically involved in thoughts about several of these warm and luscious-looking Jewish wenches, he convinced himself that he “cared only for their minds” and that what he really sought from them was the stimulation of intellectual companionship. Accordingly, the love-letters which this great-nosed innocent now wrote to them, and read to Eugene, were extraordinary and unwitting productions of defence and justification.
