WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton said she takes responsibility for coming across as “aloof,” but explains she had to adopt a cool persona decades ago to “protect” herself.

“I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions,” Clinton said in an interview for Humans of New York released Thursday.

“And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena.

“And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”

The Democratic presidential nominee recalled being among a few women about to take a law school admissions test at Harvard as men complained she didn’t belong.

“A group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense,” Clinton said.

“It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room.”

In a new podcast released Thursday by her campaign, Clinton also said there’s some comments that do still pierce her self-described “thick” skin.

“It certainly affects me. I don’t want to claim that it doesn’t because I do have – contrary to some opinion – I do have feelings,” Clinton said on the podcast. “They can get hurt.”

“I can feel really offended. It doesn’t last long because I think about what the motivation is and I really dislike bullies.”