Little by little these strange facts penetrated Keith’s subconsciousness and set up a never ending conflict between pride and precaution, between his wish to rise to a new ideal and his instinctive tendency to obey his mother’s almost hysterical injunctions against fighting of any kind.  Fortunately his road to and from school permitted him to follow the principal streets where the traffic was sufficient to act as a check on combative youngsters, and an additional protection was derived from his small size which caused the hostile elements to overlook his existence unless he appeared in the company of more developed schoolmates.  And as he mostly walked alone, his comings and goings were uneventful as a rule.  But that did not prevent him from imagining dangers and to suffer from them almost as much as if they had been real.  There were times when he could not help thinking of himself as a coward.

Such estimates of himself were not wholly checked by an incident that occurred within the school precincts early in the first term.  There was another boy in the same class named Bauer, who seemed the living counterpart of Keith—­just as undersized and lonely and nervous.  From the first there was a hostile tension between those two, and soon it came to open war.  It broke out in a pause between two lessons when practically all the boys were gathered in the schoolyard.  Before Keith quite knew what had happened, he found himself fighting Bauer.  First they used their fists and then they wrestled.  The rest of the boys formed a ring about them and egged them on.

They were well matched in their common weaknesses and both developed a certain courage during the stress of conflict.  The difference between them was that Bauer apparently wanted to lick Keith, while the latter thought of nothing but to defend himself.  The idea of inflicting pain on another human being was so foreign to Keith that it never took tangible form in his mind.  The result was that Bauer’s greater aggressiveness carried the day, and soon Keith found himself prone on his back with a triumphant Bauer straddling his chest.

At that moment both boys became guilty of serious breaches against time-honoured school etiquette.  Bauer struck the defenceless Keith square in the face with his clenched fist, and Keith burst into tears.  Quick as a flash one of the older boys grabbed Bauer by the scruff of his neck and hurled him halfway across the yard, while another one plucked Keith from the ground and shoved him toward the stairway with a contemptuous: 

“The classroom for cry-babies.”

The humiliation felt by Keith was so intense that he wondered whether he could stay in the school.  Nothing but the thought of his father kept him from returning home.  But the cloud had a silver lining.  Though no one else knew, he knew that he had started crying from rage, and not from fear.  And this fact in connection with his realization of not having had any thought of running away during the fight made him hesitate in his final judgment upon himself.  But he felt quite sure that fighting was not his chosen field.  The effect on his nerves was too damaging.