Frothingham did not take his eyes from her face as she talked. She seemed to him the most wonderful, the noblest human being in the world. “A fine, a beautiful idea,” he said. “But aren’t you afraid of spoiling those girls for workingmen’s wives? You’re educating entirely too much in this country, I should say, as it is. You’re making the lower classes restless and discontented. They’ll pull everything down about your ears the first thing you know.”
Nelly smiled—he saw that she was not seeing him at all, was looking far, far past him. “I’m not worrying about the consequences,” she said. “If we did that we should never move. You must remember that we haven’t any classes here, but are all of one class—we differ in degree, but not in kind. One can’t look into the future. I only know it was intended for the light to shine on the whole human race, and that it’s our duty to help all we can. And knowledge is light, and ignorance is darkness, isn’t it? I’m not afraid of light, anywhere. Whether it’s little or much, it’s better than darkness.”
He looked at her strangely. “I had never thought of that,” he said in a low voice. Then, after a few minutes: “How good you are! I didn’t know there was anybody in the world like you. How generous of you to give your life to these people.”
“No—no!” she protested. They were walking now through a maze of homely streets lined with flat-houses large and small and odourous of strong-smelling cookery, of decaying food, of stale whiskey and beer—a typical tenement district. “When I first began on this scheme,” she went on, “I thought as you do. But I soon saw how false, how foolishly false, that was. And if I had continued to think as at first, if I had gone into the work to patronise and to feed my vanity, I should have injured myself and all whom I wished to help. I should have made a snob of myself and parasites of them.”
She paused and into her eyes came a look which he thought “glorious.” She went on: “But fortunately, I got the right sort of guidance from the very start. And I discovered that I had more to learn than these people. I was actually more ignorant than they.” She turned her face toward him. “Did you ever think,” she asked, “what would become of you if you had all the props taken from under you, and were cast upon the world and were forced to make the fight alone—without a penny or a friend or a relative or any outside help of any kind?”
“Thought of it? Well, rather!” he exclaimed. “And I know what would happen to me—jolly quick!”
“That was my first discovery—about myself. I found that I was in the world without any fit equipment to live. I found that if the props were taken from under me I’d be no match for the working people, that I’d perish or else have to live on the charity of rich people by doing the sort of pottering work they give the poor of their own class. And I said to myself, ‘You are a fine human being, aren’t you—to pose as the superior of those who are independent and self-respecting? You call them ignorant, yet they are conforming to nature’s laws and to the conditions of life infinitely better than you, with your boasted intelligence and your fancied refinement.’ I saw that I was not a real woman, as my mother had been, but was only a parasite on the labour and the intelligence of others.”
“And what did you do?”
“I went to school with my girls. And——” Her face lighted up with enthusiasm—“oh, you don’t know what a—a magnificent—sensation it is to be conscious that one can swim alone on the sea of life without fear of drowning or of having to call for help. You spoke as if I were giving these people something. Why, I owe everything to them! It is they who gave and are giving. And I am and always shall be in their debt.”
He tried to think of some satirical phrase with which to lessen the impression what she had said was making upon him. But he could only blink into the flooding light which seemed to him to surround her and to blaze upon his pettiness and worthlessness and the tawdriness of all upon which his life had been based. In his own country, in his surroundings of alternating dulness and dissipation, his naturally good mind had become a drowsy marsh with pale lights gleaming in it occasionally here and there. Unconsciously, he had been slowly rousing ever since he landed in New York.