“The turning-point in my life is to know I got a friend. I owe it to the world to do something, to be something, after this miracle of your kindness.” And at his deepening smile, “But you are not kind in a leaning-down sort of kindness. You got none of that what-can-I-do-for-you-my-poor-child-look in you.”
Her effusiveness embarrassed him.
“You make too much out of nothing.”
“Nothing?” Her eyes were misty with emotion. “I was something wild up in the air, and I couldn’t get hold of myself all alone, and you—you made me for a person.”
“I cannot tell you how it affects me that in some way I do not understand I have been the means of bringing release to you. Of course,” he added quickly, “I was only an instrument, not a cause. Just as a spade which digs the ground is not a cause of the fertility of the soil or of the lovely flowers which spring forth. I cannot get away from the poetic, the religious experience which has so unexpectedly overtaken me.”
She listened to him in silent wonder. How different he was from the college people she had met at luncheon that day!
“I can’t put it in words,” she fumbled, “but I owe it to you, this confession. I can’t help it. I used to hate so the educated! ‘Why should they know everything, and me nothing?’ it cried in me. ‘Here I’m dying to learn, to be something, and they holding tight all the learning like misers hiding gold.’”
§ 7
President Irvine did not answer. After a while he began talking in his calm voice of his dream of democracy in education, of the plans under way for the founding of the new school.
“I see it all!” She leaped to her feet under the inspiration of his words. “This new school is not to be only for the higher-ups by the higher-ups. It’s to be for everybody—the tailor and the fish-pedlar and the butcher. And the teachers are not to be professors, talking to us down from their heads, but living people, talking out of their hearts. It’s to be what there never yet was in this country—a school for the people.”