Now and
then his boots shone, and a new dignity crept into his walk.
And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his
eyes began to expect something of this plodding boy. Thus he
passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we who
watched him felt four more years of change, which almost
transformed the tall, grave man who bowed to us commence-
ment morning. He had left his queer thought-world and come
back to a world of motion and of men. He looked now for the
first time sharply about him, and wondered he had seen so
little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time
the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first
noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression
before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints
and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or
been greeted with a laugh. He felt angry now when men did
not call him "Mister," he clenched his hands at the "Jim
Crow" cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him
and his. A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague
bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and
planning a way around these crooked things.
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