“Why are you so eager for learning?” he asked me. “Because I want to make a person of myself,” I answered. “Since I got to work for low wages and I can’t be young any more, I’m burning to get among people where it’s not against a girl if she is in years and without money.” His hand went out to me. “I’ll help you,” he said. “But you must first learn to get hold of yourself.” Such a beautiful kindness went out of his heart to me with his words! His voice, and the goodness that shone from his eyes, made me want to burst out crying, but I choked back my tears till I got home. And all night long I wept on my pillow: “Fool! What is the matter with you? Why are you crying?” But I said, “I can’t help it. He is so beautiful!” My teacher was so much above me that he wasn’t a man to me at all. He was a God. His face lighted up the shop for me, and his voice sang itself in me everywhere I went. It was like healing medicine to the flaming fever within me to listen to his voice. And then I’d repeat to myself his words and live in them as if they were religion. Often as I sat at the machine sewing the waists I’d forget what I was doing. I’d find myself dreaming in the air. “Ach!” I asked myself, “what was that beautifulness in his eyes that made the lowest nobody feel like a somebody? What was that about him that when his smile fell on me I felt lifted up to the sky away from all the coldness and the ugliness of the world? Gottunui!” I prayed, “if I could only always hold on to the light of high thoughts that shined from him. If I could only always hear in my heart the sound of his voice I would need nothing more in life. I would be happier than a bird in the air. “Friend,” I said to him once, “if you could but teach me how to get cold in the heart and clear in the head like you are!” He only smiled at me and looked far away. His calmness was like the sureness of money in the bank. Then he turned and looked on me, and said: “I am not so cold in the heart and clear in the head as I make-believe. I am bound. I am a prisoner of convention.” “You make-believe--you bound?” I burst out. “You who do not have foreladies or bosses--you who do not have to sell yourself for wages--you who only work for love and truth--you a prisoner?” “True, I do not have bosses just as you do,” he said. “But still I am not free. I am bound by formal education and conventional traditions. Though you work in a shop, you are really freer than I. You are not repressed as I am by the fear and shame of feeling. You could teach me more than I could teach you. You could teach me how to be natural.” “I’m not so natural like you think,” I said. “I’m afraid.” He smiled at me out of his eyes. “What are you afraid of?”