school!  He heard Deborah speak of a mothers’ club and a neighborhood association; and he learned of other ventures here, the school doctor, the nurse and the visitor endlessly making experiments, delving into the neighborhood for ways to meet its problems.  And by the way Deborah talked to them he felt she had gone before, that years ago by day and night she had been over the ground alone.  And she’d done all this while she lived in his house!

Scattered memories out of the past, mere fragments she had told him, here flashed back into his mind:  humorous little incidents of daily battles she had waged in rotten old tenement buildings with rags and filth and garbage, with vermin, darkness and disease.  Mingled with these had been accounts of dances, weddings and christenings and of curious funeral rites.  And struggling with such dim memories of Deborah in her twenties, called forth in his mind by the picture of the woman of thirty here, Roger grew still more confused.  What was to be the end of it?  She was still but a pioneer in a jungle, endlessly groping and trying new things.

“How many children are there in the public schools?” he asked.

“About eight hundred thousand,” Deborah said.

“Good Lord!” he groaned, and he felt within him a glow of indignation rise against these immigrant women for breeding so inconsiderately.  With the mad city growing so fast, and the people of the tenements breeding, breeding, breeding, and packing the schools to bursting, what could any teacher be but a mere cog in a machine, ponderous, impersonal, blind, grinding out future New Yorkers?

He reached home limp and battered from the storm of new impressions coming on top of his sleepless night.  He had thought of a school as a simple place, filled with little children, mischievous at times perhaps and some with dirty faces, but still with minds and spirits clean, unsoiled as yet by contact with the grim spirit of the town.  He had thought of childhood as something intimate and pure, inside his home, his family.  Instead of that, in Deborah’s school he had been disturbed and thrilled by the presence all around him of something wild, barbaric, dark, compounded of the city streets, of surging crowds, of rushing feet, of turmoil, filth, disease and death, of poverty and vice and crime.  But Roger could still hear that band.  And behind its blaring crash and din he had felt the vital throbbing of a tremendous joyousness, of gaiety, fresh hopes and dreams, of leaping young emotions like deep buried bubbling springs bursting up resistlessly to renew the fevered life of the town!  Deborah’s big family!  Everybody’s children!

“You will live on in our children’s lives.”  The vision hidden in those words now opened wide before his eyes.

CHAPTER XI

She told him the next morning her night school closed for the summer that week.

“I think I should like to see it,” her father said determinedly.  She gave him an affectionate smile: