It was wanting to see him so much that made me take out my book again, after a long lapse, and read it over. The first pages were just as I wrote them, on the wrapping-paper that came around the boys' overalls. Then there were the sheets of manila paper that I had bought at the drug store near the first little room that Mrs. Bingy and I took--I remember how I had got up early and walked to the factory one morning to save the nickel for the paper. Then a few pages that I had made at the school on empty theme books; and some more on the Massys' guest paper, gray with lavender lining and a Paris maker's name. Now I went on writing my book with a typewriter that I was learning to use, since a man on Mrs. Bingy's floor let me borrow his machine when he went out in the mornings. My whole history was in those different kinds of paper in my book. Those typewritten pages are of interest chiefly to myself. They are like the thirty pages that I threw away because they told only about my going from one factory to another. Only now the typewritten pages were not about events at all, but about the things that went on in me. And those I can sum up in a few words: For the important thing is that in those pages I was recording my growing understanding of something which Rose, out of her sordid living, had done so much to teach me: that my life was not important just because it was the life of Cosma Wakely alone, but it was important in proportion as it saw itself a part of the life about it--the life of school, of working women and men, of all men and women, of all beings. I began to wonder not so much how I could make my own individual "success," whatever that means, as how I could take my place in the task that we're all doing together--and of finding out what that task is. That, in short, is what those years meant to me. The incidents do not so much matter. Nobody gets this understanding in the way that any one else gets it. It is the individual quest, the individual revelation. Experience, education, love, the mere wear and tear of living, all go toward this understanding. Most of all, love. I think that for me the university and the entire faculty were only auxiliary lights to the light that shone on me, over seas and lands, from the interior of China!