"Nellie," said I, "you are a woman and my sister. I'm very sorry, but I don't believe it." "I thought you wouldn't," said she. Women always will have the last word. CHAPTER III The blue shore line of one's own land always brings a thrill of the heart; to me, buried exile as I had been, the heart-leap was choking. Ours was a slow steamer, and we did not stop at Montauk where the mail and the swiftest travelers landed, nor in Jamaica Harbor with the immigrants. As we swept along the sunny, level spaces of the South shore, Nellie told me how Long Island was now the "Reception Room" of our country, instead of poor, brutal little Ellis Island. "The shores are still mostly summer places," she said. "One of the most convincing of our early lines of advance was started on the South shore; and there are plenty of Country Clubs, Home Parks and things like that; but the bulk of the island toward the western end is an experiment station in applied sociology." I was watching the bright shore hungrily. With a glass I could see many large buildings, not too closely set. "I should think it would spoil the place for homes," I said. Nellie had a way of listening to my remarks, kindly and pleasantly, but as if I were somehow a long way off and she was trying to grasp what I said. "In a way it did--at first;" she explained presently, "but even then it meant just as many homes for other people, and now it means so much more!" She hesitated a moment and then plunged in resolutely. "You're in for a steady course of instructive remarks from now on. Everybody will be explaining things and bragging about them. We haven't outgrown some of the smaller vices, you see. As to this 'Immigration Problem'--we woke up to this fact among others, that the 'reintegration of peoples' as Ward called it, was a sociological process not possible to stop, but quite possible to assist and to guide to great advantage. And here in America we recognized our own special place--'the melting pot,' you know?" Yes, I remembered the phrase, I never liked it. Our family were pure English stock, and rightly proud of their descent. "I begin to see, my dear sister, that while receiving the torrent of instructive remarks you foretell, the way of wisdom for me is steadfastly to withhold my own opinions." Nellie laughed appreciatively. "You always had a long head, John. Well, whether you like it or not, our people saw their place and power at last and rose to it. We refuse no one. We have discovered as many ways of utilizing human waste as we used to have for the waste products of coal tar." "You don't mean to say idiots and criminals?" I protested.