One of the new buildings that was early added to the original Hull-House was a gymnasium, which provided opportunities for swimming, basket-ball, and dancing. "We have swell times in our Hull-House club," boasted black-eyed Angelina. "Our floor in the gym puts it all over the old dancehalls for a jolly good hop,--no saloon next door with all that crowd, good classy music, and the right sort of girls and fellows. Then sometimes our club has a real party in the coffeehouse. That's what I call a fine, cozy time; makes a girl glad she's living." Hull-House also puts within the reach of many the things which their active minds crave, and opens the way to a new life and success in the world. "Don't you remember me?" a rising young newspaper man once said to Miss Addams. "I used to belong to a Hull-House club." "Tell me what Hull-House did for you that really helped," she took occasion to ask. "It was the first house I had ever been in," he replied promptly, "where books and magazines just lay around as if there were plenty of them in the world. Don't you remember how much I used to read at that little round table at the back of the library?" Some good people who visit the Settlement in a patronizing mood are surprised to discover that many of "these working-girls" have a taste for what is fine. Miss Addams likes to tell them about the intelligent group who followed the reading of George Eliot's "Romola" with unflagging interest. "The club was held in our dining-room," she said to one incredulous visitor, "and two of the girls came early regularly to help wash the dishes and arrange the photographs of Florence on the table. Do you know," she added, looking her prosperous guest quietly in the eyes, "that the young woman of whom you were inquiring about 'these people' is one of our neighborhood girls? Those who live in these dingy streets because they are poor and must live near their work are not a different order of beings. Don't forget what Lincoln said, 'God must love the common people--He made so many of them.' You have only to live at Hull-House a while to learn how true it is that God loves them." "Nothing has ever meant more real inspiration to me," said a student of sociology from the university, who had spent a year in the Settlement, "than the way the poor help each other. A woman who supports three children by scrubbing will share her breakfast with the people in the next tenement because she has heard that they are 'hard up'; a man who has been out of work has a month's rent paid by a young chap in the stock-yards who boarded with him last year; a Swedish girl works in the laundry for her German neighbor to let her stay home with her sick baby--and so it goes."