A week ago she would scarcely have noticed the people about her.  For ten years she had gone every morning to her work through the streets, and she had felt herself to be as aloof from the masses as the soaring skyscraper at the corner of Broadway.  The psychology of the crowd had not touched her; even when she walked with it, when she made a part of it, she had felt herself to be detached from its purposes.

To-day, however, a change had come over her, and she was happy with a large and impersonal happiness which seemed to belong less to herself than to the throng which surged about her and gathered her in.  Her little standards, her little creeds, had become a part of the larger standards and creeds of humanity.  In Broadway, moving onward with the other workers who were returning to the day’s work, she was aware of an invisible current of joy which flowed from the crowd into her thoughts and through her thoughts back again into the crowd.  For the first time she was feeling and thinking in unison with the multitude.

That night, when she sat alone with Miss Polly, she said to her suddenly: 

“I believe I was wrong to wish Archibald not to see anything of Mr. O’Hara.  Yesterday we had a long talk, and I think he must have some very fine traits.”

“Maybe,” replied Miss Polly, a little snappishly.  “I never could see what set you so against him, Gabriella.”

“Oh, he is dreadfully slangy, and, of course, he isn’t educated.  I suppose if I mentioned Hamlet to him, he’d think I was talking about some town in Oklahoma.”

“Well, I reckon he’s been his own Hamlet,” retorted Miss Polly; “and knowing about Hamlet don’t make a man, anyhow.  George knew all about Hamlet, but it didn’t make him easy to live with.”

“Yes, that’s just it.  What did George’s advantages do for him?  I used to think it was love that mattered most,” she said musingly after a pause, “and then, when love failed, I began to think it was culture.  But I see now that it is something else.  Do you ever wonder what the essential thing really is, Miss Polly?”

“No, I never wonder,” responded Miss Polly tartly, “but when you stew it down to the bones, I reckon it’s just plain character.”

“Yes, if you can’t have both culture and character, of course character is the more important.  But think how much that man might have made of the university training that was wasted on George.”  While she spoke there came back to her in snatches a conversation she had had with an Englishman on the boat last summer, and she remembered that he had alluded to Judge Crowborough as “a man of the broadest culture.”  Surely the “broadest culture” must include character, and yet she could feel even now the casual and business-like clasp of the judge, she could see again the admiring gleam in his small, fishy eyes.  “After all, I suppose it is a kind of spiritual consciousness that makes character,” she said aloud, “and you can’t train that into a man if he isn’t born with it.”