"Perhaps I can be yet. I can try. If I had you to help me, with your pure ideals, and the boy to keep my heart open for the children. I don't know much about these things, but I can learn. I can read, you can tell me what to read. We could study together. And in my position perhaps, I could really be of some service after all."
"Perhaps?" She watched him, the strong rather heavy face, the attractive smile, the eyes that interested and compelled. He was an able, masterful man. He surely loved her now. She could feel a power over him that her short miserable marriage had never given her; and her girlhood's attraction toward him reasserted itself.
A new noise rose about them, a dissonant mingled merry outcry, made into a level roaring sound by their height above the street.
"That's when the school up here lets out," she said. "We hear it every day. Just see the crowds of them!"
They leaned on the broad sill and watched the many-colored torrent of juveniles pouring past.
"One day it was different," she said. "A strange jarring shrillness in it, a peculiar sound. I looked out, and there was a fight going on; two boys tumbling about from one side of the street to the other, with a moving ring around them, a big crowd, all roaring in one key."
"You get a birdseye view of life in these streets, don't you. Can you make out that little chap with the red hair down there?"
"No—we are both near-sighted, you know. I can't distinguish faces at this distance. Can you?"
"Not very clearly," he said. "But what a swarm they are!"
"Come away," said she, "I can't bear to look at them. So many children in that stony street, and those cars going up and down like roaring lions!"