He tried to think of some satirical phrase with which to lessen the impression what she had said was making upon him. But he could only blink into the flooding light which seemed to him to surround her and to blaze upon his pettiness and worthlessness and the tawdriness of all upon which his life had been based. In his own country, in his surroundings of alternating dulness and dissipation, his naturally good mind had become a drowsy marsh with pale lights gleaming in it occasionally here and there. Unconsciously, he had been slowly rousing ever since he landed in New York. The people he had met were like enough to those he had met at home, and also like enough to the people of the real America from which they were offshoots, to form for him a mental bridge on which he could pass from his England of narrow and bigoted caste to Nelly’s America of alert and intelligent and self-respecting, level-eyed humanity. And he was now feeling in this restless Chicago the fierce impact of energies and aspirations of which he had had no conception, of which he could never have a clear conception. Through the eyes of this earnest, unaffected girl with her lived ideal of self-forgetfulness he had been getting confused, dazzling glimpses of a new world. But he did clearly see and feel that he loved her. And she now saw in his curiously changed face what was in his mind. She looked away instantly--her expression was uneasy, almost frightened. “Here we are--at the school,” she said nervously as they turned a corner and came in sight of three great buildings--plain yet attractive--which faced three sides of a broad lawn in the centre of which a large and artistic fountain was playing. He never could give a clear account of that school. He remembered the manager--a Mr. Worthington, with a strong and serious, yet anything but solemn face, with rather homely features except a pair of extraordinary eyes. He remembered many classrooms where all sorts of feminine enterprises were going forward with energetic informality. He remembered many girls--uncommonly clean, bright, well-dressed girls with agreeable voices and manners. He remembered many smiles and other evidences of health and spirits. He remembered many babies--all in one big, sunny room, chirping and crowing and gurgling, balancing on uncertain little lumps of feet or crawling toilsomely. “Practice babies,” Nelly called them, and he thought, “If this is the way her girls succeed with mere ‘practice babies,’ what won’t they make of their own?” Finally, he remembered--Nelly. All his other memories were a hazy background for her tall, graceful figure and wonderful, luminous face. Her he never forgot in the smallest detail of look or gesture.