“I hope you will do all those things.  You could do nothing better calculated to help your chances.”

“Chances?”

“Your chances—­and we don’t any of us have too many of coming to some good sometime.”

“I believe you are really serious; but I don’t understand you.”

“Then I shall be explicit.  Just this, then, to play the ungrateful part of the frank friend.  The sooner you get your fingers burnt, the sooner you will let the fire alone.  I suppose Mr. Bassett has given the word that you are graciously to be permitted to sit in his legislature.  He could hardly do less for you than that, after he sent you into the arena last June to prod the sick lion for his entertainment.”

They were waiting at a corner for a break in the street traffic, and he turned toward her guardedly.

“You put it pretty low,” he mumbled.

“The thing itself is not so bad.  From what I have heard and read about Mr. Bassett, I don’t think he is really an evil person.  He probably didn’t start with any sort of ideals of public life:  you did.  I read in an essay the other night that the appeal of the highest should be always to the lowest.  But you’re not appealing to anybody; you’re just following the band wagon to the centre of the track.  Stop, Look, Listen!  You’ve come far enough with me now.  The walls of my prison house loom before me.  Good-morning!”

“Good-morning and good luck!”

That night Sylvia wrote a letter to one of her classmates in Boston.  “I’m a school-teacher,” she said,—­“a member of the gray sisterhood of American nuns.  All over this astonishing country my sisters of this honorable order rise up in the morning, even as you and I, to teach the young idea how to shoot.  I look with veneration upon those of our sisterhood who have grown old in the classroom.  I can see myself reduced to a bundle of nerves, irascible, worthless, ready for the scrap-pile at, we will say, forty-two—­only twenty years ahead of me!  My work looks so easy and I like it so much that I went in fright to the dictionary to look up the definition of teacher.  I find that I’m one who teaches or instructs.  Think of it—­I!  That definition should be revised to read, ’Teacher:  one who, conveying certain information to others, reads in fifty faces unanswerable questions as to the riddle of existence.’  ’School:  a place where the presumably wise are convinced of their own folly.’  Note well, my friend:  I am a gray sister, in a gray serge suit that fits, with white cuffs and collar, and with chalk on my fingers.  Oh, it’s not what I’m required to teach, but what I’m going to learn that worries me!”

Lueders’s shop was not far from Sylvia’s school and Allen devised many excuses for waylaying her.  His machine being forbidden, he hung about until she appeared and trudged homeward with her.  Often he came in a glow from the cabinetmaker’s and submitted for her judgment the questions that had been debated that day at the shop.  There was something sweet and wistful and charming in his boyishness; and she was surprised, as Harwood had been from the first, by the intelligence he evinced in political and social questions.  He demanded absolute answers to problems that were perplexing wise men all over the world.