“If you want to listen to sense from a friend, so I have a good match for you,” he said, following me to the door. “I have on my list a widower with not more than five or six children. He has a grand business, a herring-stand on Hester Street. He don’t ask for no money, and he don’t make an objection if the girl is in years, so long as she knows how to cook well for him.” How I got myself back to my room I don’t know. But for two days and for two nights I lay still on my bed, unable to move. I looked around on my empty walls, thinking, thinking, “Where am I? Is this the world? Is this America?” Suddenly I sprang up from bed. “What can come from pitying yourself?” I cried. “If the world kicks you down and makes nothing of you, you bounce yourself up and make something of yourself.” A fire blazed up in me to rise over the world because I was downed by the world. “Make a person of yourself,” I said. “Begin to learn English. Make yourself for an American if you want to live in America. American girls don’t go to matchmakers. American girls don’t run after a man: if they don’t get a husband they don’t think the world is over; they turn their mind to something else. “Wake up!” I said to myself. “You want love to come to you? Why don’t you give it out to other people? Love the women and children, everybody in the street and the shop. Love the rag-picker and the drunkard, the bad and the ugly. All those whom the world kicks down you pick up and press to your heart with love.” As I said this I felt wells of love that choked in me all my life flowing out of me and over me. A strange, wonderful light like a lover’s smile melted over me, and the sweetness of lover’s arms stole around me. The first night I went to school I felt like falling on everybody’s neck and kissing them. I felt like kissing the books and the benches. It was such great happiness to learn to read and write the English words. Because I started a few weeks after the beginning of the term, my teacher said I might stay after the class to help me catch up with my back lessons. The minute I looked on him I felt that grand feeling: “Here is a person! Here is America!” His face just shined with high thoughts. There was such a beautiful light in his eyes that it warmed my heart to steal a look on him. At first, when it came my turn to say something in the class, I got so excited the words stuck and twisted in my mouth and I couldn’t give out my thoughts. But the teacher didn’t see my nervousness. He only saw that I had something to say, and he helped me say it. How or what he did I don’t know. I only felt his look of understanding flowing into me like draughts of air to one who is choking. Long after I already felt free and easy to talk to him alone after the class, I looked at all the books on his desk. “Oi weh!” I said to him, “if I only knew half of what is in your books, I couldn’t any more sit still in the chair like you. I’d fly in the air with the joy of so much knowledge.”