"Well," he went on, "until I was ten years old I attended the parochial school----" "John, you're not a _Catholic_!" she exclaimed. "No--you needn't be afraid of that either--I'm not--now," he answered. "And then," he continued as calmly as before, "I was sent to the public schools. It was the superintendent who wrote my name 'Adams.' He did it perhaps by accident; anyway it has been my name ever since. Plain 'John Adams.' I don't suppose I could make you understand the relation between parents and an only son among my people, so I shan't try, but it is to the son that the parents look for the fulfilment of all their happiest hopes. That I should have been sent here to college is not so surprising as you may consider it. I _was_ sent here. I was sent here by my father who works in the sand of the moulding room; by my mother who, to help, has for three years taken in washing; and by my little sister, Pauline, who sits all day at a bench and tears the stems out of tobacco leaves in a great, gray factory. They are the ones who have sent me here to college--to study, to learn, to make something of myself----" Thus far to the girl, save for little moments when from the narrative she had suffered twinges of pain, it was as though she were listening to a story of one whom she knew not. She had been moved and strangely thrilled at times and now leaning forward eagerly she exclaimed: "And you have made something of yourself; you have, John! Oh, don't you see how brave you are--what you can _do_ with the education they have given you; what you can accomplish for yourself, and so, for them?" He did not interrupt her but when she had done he looked down at her pityingly and muttered, as though suffering an intense physical agony: "Oh Janet! to hear you talk like that--to hear you say such things; to feel you haven't understood." She looked away from him piqued, chagrined that she had erred. "I brave!" he went on, "_I_ brave? Do you think _I_ dare call myself brave when I think of that little girl tearing stems out of tobacco leaves until her fingers are stiff; when I think of my mother bent over a tub, her face wreathed in steam--I can hear the smooth rasp of the wet clothes now as she rubs them on the board? I _brave_ when I see my father working in the awful heat of a moulding room--cooked alive--that I may dawdle here and kick a leather ball about a field." He looked away with a sneer. But the bitterness in his voice failed to move her. "Your education!" she exclaimed, tersely,--"you have that!" He laughed harshly. "Education! my education! What is it? There are my people--my father a moulder, a good workman who sometimes is drunk, and, so, a drunkard; my mother a wash-woman; my little sister a stripper in a cigar factory. They have given me my education and in giving me it what have they done? They have made me _hate_ them!" "John, John, you mustn't say that," she implored.