“I guess so,” came the answer vaguely, but politely. “I live about half a mile below you, Miss Ainsworth, at the foot of the canyon on the bay front. That’s all the diff there is between us and you highbrows in Mission Hills—about half a mile of canyon.” He smiled broadly, pleased with his fancy.
“That isn’t much, is it, Angelo? And it will be less pretty soon, now that we are trying to open our eyes. Good night, Angelo. I will see you to-morrow—really see you, I mean. And please don’t assimilate me quite so fast—you must give me time. I—I am new to this business and progress very slowly.”
Then she said good night again, and went away. And Angelo swaggered back to his companions. “Gee, ain’t she a beaut?” he gloated. “All the swells in our building is nuts on that dame. But she gives ’em all the go-by.”
Then the Irish-American League, without the assimilator, went into a private session with cigarettes and near-beer in a small dingy room far down on Fifth Street—a session that lasted far into the night.
But Eveley Ainsworth did not know that. She was sitting in the dark beside her window, staring out at the lights that circled the bay. But she did not see them.
“Assimilate the foreign element,” she whispered in a frightened voice. “I am afraid we can’t. It is too late. They got started first—and they are so shrewd. But we’ve got to do something, and quickly, or—they will assimilate us, beyond a doubt. And weren’t they right about it, after all? Isn’t it patriotism and loyalty for them to go out to foreign countries to pick up the finest and best of our civilization and take it back to enrich their native land? It is almost—blasphemous—to teach them a new patriotism to a new country. And yet we have to do it, to make our country safe for us. But who has brains enough and heart enough to do it? Oh, dear! And they do not call it duty that brings them here to take what we can give them—they call it love—not love of us and of America, but love of the little Wops and the little Greasers and the little Polaks in their own home-land. Oh, dear, such a frightful mess we have got ourselves into. And what a dunce I was to go to that silly meeting and get myself mixed up in it.”