Summary

The speaker walks through a schoolhouse observing the children who study there, and speaking with the nuns who watch over them. They study academic and domestic arts, but stop briefly to look at the newcomer to their class. The speaker thinks back to a woman he knew and the day she told him of a sad story from school, and he felt that they understood each other intimately. He looks around the classroom and compares the children there to the woman of his past, wondering what the woman would have looked like at that age. Suddenly, he sees a girl that looks just like her and feels a flurry of emotion. The speaker thinks about how the woman looks now, old and gaunt but still beautiful in her own way. He himself has never been as beautiful as her, but he wasn’t bad...