West put a laughing face upon these calumnies, but to himself he owned that he was deeply hurt.  Dropping in at the club that night, he found a group of men, all his friends, eagerly discussing the shindig, as they called it.  Joining in with that perfect good-humor and lack of false pride which was characteristic of him, he gathered that all of them thought he had made a mistake.  It seemed to be considered that Brown had put himself in a bad light by trying to throw the blame on Jones.  Jones, they said, should not have been bounced without Brown, and probably the best thing would have been not to bounce either.  The irritating thing about this latter view was that it was exactly what West had thought in the first place, before pressure was applied to him.

In the still watches of the night the young man was harried by uncertainties and tortured by stirring suspicions.  Had he been fair to Jones, after all?  Was his summary action in regard to that youth prompted in the faintest degree by personal dislike?  Was he conceivably the kind of man who is capable of thinking one thing and doing another?  The most afflicting of all doubts, doubt of himself, kept the young man tossing on his pillow for at least an hour.

But he woke with a clear-cut decision singing in his mind and gladdening his morning.  He would take Jones back.  He would generously reinstate the youth, on the ground that the public mortification already put upon him was a sufficient punishment for his sins and abundant warning for others like-minded.  This would settle all difficulties at one stroke and definitely lay the ghost of a disagreeable occurrence.  The solution was so simple that he marvelled that he had not thought of it before.

His morning’s mail, containing one or two very unpleasant letters, only strengthened his determination.  He lost no time in carrying it out.  By special messenger he dispatched a carefully written and kindly letter to Jones, Senior.  Jones, Senior, tore it across the middle and returned it by the same messenger.  He then informed the Chronicle what he had done.  The Chronicle that afternoon shrieked it under a five-column head, together with a ferocious statement from Jones, Senior, saying that he would rather see his son breaking rocks in the road than a student in such a college as Blaines was, under the present regime.  The editor, instead of seeing in West’s letter a spontaneous act of magnanimity in the interest of the academic uplift, maliciously twisted it into a grudging confession of error, “unrelieved by the grace of manly retraction and apology.”  So ran the editorial, which was offensively headed “West’s Fatal Flop.”  Some of the State papers, it seemed from excerpts printed in another column, were foolishly following the Chronicle’s lead; Republican cracker-box orators were trying somehow to make capital of the thing; and altogether there was a very unpleasant little mess, which showed signs of developing rapidly into what is known as an “issue.”