This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

depth.
    But the trumpets were sounding for Amory’s preliminary skirmish with his own generation.
    “You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not,” said Monsignor.
    “I am sorry—”
    “No, you’re not. No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
    “Well—”
    “Good-by.”

The Egotist Down
    Amory’s two years at St. Regis’, though in turn painful and triumphant, had as little real significance in his own life as the American “prep” school, crushed as it is under the heel of the universities, has to American life in general. We have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we have, instead, clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools.
    He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered both conceited and arrogant, and universally detested. He played football intensely, alternating a reckless brilliancy with a tendency to keep himself as safe from hazard as decency would permit. In a wild panic he backed out of a fight with a boy his own size, to a chorus of scorn, and a week later, in desperation, picked a battle with another boy very much bigger, from which he emerged badly beaten, but rather proud of himself.
    He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.
    There were some few grains of comfort. Whenever Amory was submerged, his vanity was the last part to go below the surface, so he could still enjoy a comfortable glow when “Wookey-wookey,” the deaf old housekeeper, told him that he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. It had pleased him to be the lightest and youngest man on the first football squad; it pleased him when Doctor Dougall told him at the end of a heated conference that he could, if he wished, get the best marks in school. But Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was temperamentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school.
    Miserable, confined to bounds, unpopular with both faculty and students—that was Amory’s first term. But at Christmas he had returned to Minneapolis, tight-lipped and strangely jubilant.
    “Oh, I was sort of fresh at first,” he told Frog Parker patronizingly, “but I got along fine—lightest man on the squad. You ought to go away to school, Froggy. It’s great stuff.”

Incident of the Well-Meaning Professor
    On the last night of his first term, Mr. Margotson, the senior master, sent word to study hall that Amory was to come to his room at nine. Amory suspected that advice was forthcoming, but he determined to be courteous, because this Mr. Margotson had been kindly disposed toward him.
    His summoner received him gravely, and motioned him to a chair. He hemmed several times and looked consciously kind, as a man will when he knows he’s on delicate ground.
    “Amory,” he began. “I’ve sent for you on a personal matter.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I’ve noticed you this year and I—I like you. I think you have in you the makings of a—a very good man.”
    “Yes, sir,” Amory managed to articulate. He hated having people talk as if he were an admitted failure.
    “But I’ve noticed,” continued the older man blindly, “that you’re not very popular with the boys.”
    “No, sir.” Amory licked his lips.
    ‘Ah—I thought you might not understand exactly what it was they—ah—objected to. I’m going to tell you, because I believe—ah-that when a boy knows his difficulties he’s better able to cope with them—to conform to what others expect of him.” He a-hemmed