Lines came into Hagar's forehead between her eyes. She had seen this man somewhere. Where? She had a trick of holding her mind passive, when the wanted memory would slowly rise, like water from a deep, deep well. Now, after a minute or two, it came. She had seen him in the street-car that night, going from Eglantine to see "Romeo and Juliet." He had been in workman's clothes, he had touched her skirt, standing before her in the car; then he had found a seat, and she had watched him unfold and read a newspaper. Some vague, uncertain thought that she could not trace had made her regard him at intervals until with Miss Bedford and Lily and Laydon she had left the car.... The man on the platform had shaken off the initial clumsiness of speech and bearing. Like a swimmer, he had needled the wave. He was not clumsy now; he was speaking with short, stripped words, nakedly, with earnestness at white heat. Once he had been dumb and angry, he said, as a maddened dog. He had been through years that had made him so. He had been growing like a wolf. There were times when he wanted to take hold of the world's throat and tear it out. "Do you remember Ishmael in the Bible?--his hand against every man and every man's hand against him? Well, I was growing to feel that way." Then at that point--"and that was perhaps three years ago, and I was down South in a town in my state, trying to get work. I knew how to break rock, and I knew how to make parts of shoes, and I didn't know much besides, except that it was a hard world and I hated it"--at this point chance "or something" had sent him an acquaintance, an educated man, a bookkeeper in the concern where he finally got a job. Out of the acquaintanceship had grown a friendship. "After a while I got to going to his house. He had a wife who helped him lots." The three used to talk together, and the man lent him books and made him read them, and "little by little, he led me on. He was like an old man I knew in the mountains when I was a boy. He showed me that we're all sick and sorry, but that we're growing a principle of health. He showed me how slow we creep up from worm to man, and how now we're fluttering toward something farther on, and how hands of the past come upon us, and how we yet escape--and the wings strengthen. He showed me how vindictiveness is no use, and how much that is wrong with the world is owing to poor social mechanism and can be changed. He showed me what Brotherliness means, on the road to Unity. He put it in my mind and heart to want to help. He told me I had a good mind. I had always rather liked books, but I'd been where I couldn't get any, even if they'd given you time for reading. He made me study things out, and one day I began to think--think for myself--think it out. I've never stopped. Usually now, I'm at night-school nights. I'm learning, and I'm going to keep on, until I make thinking Wisdom." He studied the ceiling a moment, then spoke out with a ring in his voice.