Frothingham did not take his eyes from her face as she talked. She seemed to him the most wonderful, the noblest human being in the world. “A fine, a beautiful idea,” he said. “But aren’t you afraid of spoiling those girls for workingmen’s wives? You’re educating entirely too much in this country, I should say, as it is. You’re making the lower classes restless and discontented. They’ll pull everything down about your ears the first thing you know.”
Nelly smiled--he saw that she was not seeing him at all, was looking far, far past him. “I’m not worrying about the consequences,” she said. “If we did that we should never move. You must remember that we haven’t any classes here, but are all of one class--we differ in degree, but not in kind. One can’t look into the future. I only know it was intended for the light to shine on the whole human race, and that it’s our duty to help all we can. And knowledge is light, and ignorance is darkness, isn’t it? I’m not afraid of light, anywhere. Whether it’s little or much, it’s better than darkness.”
He looked at her strangely. “I had never thought of that,” he said in a low voice. Then, after a few minutes: “How good you are! I didn’t know there was anybody in the world like you. How generous of you to give your life to these people.”
“No--no!” she protested. They were walking now through a maze of homely streets lined with flat-houses large and small and odourous of strong-smelling cookery, of decaying food, of stale whiskey and beer--a typical tenement district. “When I first began on this scheme,” she went on, “I thought as you do. But I soon saw how false, how foolishly false, that was. And if I had continued to think as at first, if I had gone into the work to patronise and to feed my vanity, I should have injured myself and all whom I wished to help. I should have made a snob of myself and parasites of them.”
She paused and into her eyes came a look which he thought “glorious.” She went on: “But fortunately, I got the right sort of guidance from the very start. And I discovered that I had more to learn than these people. I was actually more ignorant than they.” She turned her face toward him. “Did you ever think,” she asked, “what would become of you if you had all the props taken from under you, and were cast upon the world and were forced to make the fight alone--without a penny or a friend or a relative or any outside help of any kind?”