“I am not in sympathy with the club idea,” said Hiltze thoughtfully, as they turned down Broadway toward the Grant. “It is such a treat to find your kind of woman in this—I mean, the womanly kind—I abhor the high-brow women that are so full of forward movement they can’t settle down to pal around comfortably and be human.”
Eveley, too, was kindling with the charm of a common interest and enthusiasm. Nolan took a very masculine stand on the subject. He said bruskly that the growth of Americanization must come from Americans. He said you couldn’t cram American ideals into the foreign-born until the home-born lived them. And he said the way to “teach Americanization was by being a darned good American yourself inside and outside and all the way through.” Which may have been good sense, but was no help in the forward movement.
So Eveley looked upon Mr. Hiltze with great friendliness and sympathy, though she did glance up at the National Building as they went by, noticing the light in Nolan’s window, wondering if he was working hard—and if the work necessitated the presence of the new, good-looking stenographer the firm had lately acquired.
“Now, my idea of Americanization,” Mr. Hiltze was saying when she finally tore her thoughts away from the National Building, “is pure personal effort. You take a club, and mix a lot of nationalities, and types, and interests up together—they work upon one another, and work upon you, and you get nowhere. But take an individual. Get chummy with him. Be with him. Study him. Make him like you—interest him in your work, and your sport, and your life—and there you have an American pretty soon. Club work is not definite, not decisive. It is the personal touch that counts. You could fritter away hours with a baseball club, and end at last just where you began. But you put the same time into definite personal contact with one individual foreigner—a girl, of course it would be in your case—it is young men in mine. You take a girl—a foreigner—win her confidence, then her interest, then her love—and you’ve made an American. That is the only Americanization that will stick. Suppose in a whole year you have won only one—still see what you have done. That one will go out among her friends, her relatives, she will marry and have children—and your Americanization is sown and re-sown, and goes on multiplying itself—yes, forever.”
“You are right,” said Eveley. “And you find me a girl, and I will do it.”
“It is a bargain,” he said quickly, stopping in the street to grasp her hand. “You are a little thoroughbred, aren’t you? It may take time, but as I go about among the young men I work with—well, I am pretty sure to find a girl among them.”