“In imagination one builds castles in Spain.” This was encouraging, but what she called _châteaux d’Espagne_ seemed not, however, to find great favor, for a silence fell on that bright-eyed class. “But isn’t that all right?” continued Lieutenant Fress, giving a fillip. “Must we think only of the things we can see and touch?” At the mention of seeing and touching, hands again shot up. He indicated a thick-haired, heavy-browed girl. “In thinking of the things she doesn’t see, the good housewife would forget to cook the dinner, _et cela serait tommage_,” was the answer coming from the deepest depths of her consciousness. On which we leave the schoolroom, with its extremely practical atmosphere, the argument being unanswerable, even by Lieutenant Fress. I could but think on that long line of peasants who have wrestled with realities, begotten, brought forth, tilled the soil, baked the bread, struggling all the time with their border-destiny, nature and history, even more than their own wills, having made them what they are. It struck me as reasonable that they should be a canny set, those little girls. Something alert, perceptive of realities, was forming them, they could not be over-given to dreams, for which one is both sorry and glad, according to the way one happens to feel about human things at the moment—and not necessarily the way they are. Even Marcus Aurelius tells us that “if a thing displease us” (I suppose he only forgot to add, “or if a thing please us”) “it is not that thing, but our view of that thing.” And certainly a lot of perfectly good things are spoiled by the point of view. In the next room they were having a lesson in American history, quite in the note everywhere these days, and I know the Sister saw the hand of God as I entered at that special moment (she was a quiet-eyed, not very young Sister, who had trod further paths than those of learning). Then and there I heard the tale of the Boston Tea-party, and its consequences, of the War of the Rebellion, and the name of Lincoln, pronounced “Lancone,” who “wanted all men to be free and equal,” sounded through the room. No one, of course, expressed a doubt, nor ever will in schoolrooms, that men aren’t free, neither are they equal. As for myself, I thank God nearly every morning that some men always will be better than others, realizing that there is more difference between man and man than between man and beast, which truth was recalled to me but shortly by an equalitarian friend of the New Republic—but it’s not for schools, like many other truths. Even Saint Paul can do nothing except cry out, “Shall not the potter have power to shape the vessel as he will, some to honor, some to dishonor?” which again recognizes the fact of inequality without explaining it. However, there’s no use going into that now.