“I am glad you wanted to tell me,” said Sharlee, “but I have known it for—­oh, the longest time.”

“In a certain sense,” he hurried on—­“quite a different sense—­I should say that your talk—­the only one of the kind I ever had—­did for me the sort of thing ... that most men’s mothers do for them when they are young.”

She made no reply.

“Perhaps,” he said, almost defiantly, “you don’t like my saying that?”

“Oh, yes!  I like it very much.”

“And yet,” he said, “I don’t think of you as I fancy a man would think of his mother, or even of his sister.  It is rather extraordinary.  It has become clear to me that you have obtained a unique place in my thought—­in my regard.  Well, good-night.”

She looked up at him, without, however, quite meeting his eyes.

“Oh!  Do you think you must go?”

“Well—­yes.  I have said everything that I came to say.  Did you want me to stay particularly?”

“Not if you feel that you shouldn’t.  You’ve been very good to give me a whole evening, as it is.”

“I’ll tell you one more thing before I go.”

He took another turn up and down the room, and halted frowning in front of her.

“I am thinking of making an experiment in practical social work next year.  What would be your opinion of a free night-school for working boys?”

Sharlee, greatly surprised by the question, said that the field was a splendid one.

He went on at once:  “Technical training, of course, would be the nominal basis of it.  I could throw in, also, boxing and physical culture.  Buck Klinker would be delighted to help there.  By the way, you must know Klinker:  he has some first-rate ideas about what to do for the working population.  Needless to say, both the technical and physical training would be only baits to draw attendance, though both could be made very valuable.  My main plan is along a new line.  I want to teach what no other school attempts—­only one thing, but that to be hammered in so that it can never be forgotten.”

“What is that?”

“You might sum it all up as the doctrine of individual responsibility.”

She echoed his term inquiringly, and he made a very large gesture.

“I want to see if I can teach boys that they are not individuals—­not unrelated atoms in a random universe.  Teach them that they live in a world of law—­of evolution by law—­that they are links, every one of them, in a splendid chain that has been running since life began, and will run on to the end of time.  Knock into their heads that no chain is stronger than its weakest link, and that this means them.  Don’t you see what a powerful socializing force there is in the sense of personal responsibility, if cultivated in the right direction?  A boy may be willing to take his chances on going to the bad—­economically and socially, as well as morally—­if he thinks that it is only his own personal concern.  But he will hesitate when you once impress upon him that, in doing so, he is blocking the whole magnificent procession.  My plan would be to develop these boys’ social efficiency by stamping upon them the knowledge that the very humblest of them holds a trusteeship of cosmic importance.”