"It cost half a million dollars," he told her; "it has a hundred and sixty rooms and it holds six thousand pupils. Think of that! Six thousand,—not your pasty-faced, moping diggers either, but all noisy, laughing, healthy girls. The equipment is wonderful—just wonderful: you girls from the old Americus High School would think you were in Heaven if you came here. There are two big restaurants, chemical and physical laboratories, a conservatory, a zoological garden and a roof-garden, and laundries. There’s a regular theater—stage, scenery, and all that—a store, a bank, a housekeeping department, and an employment bureau. They have an orchestra, and they dance. There are nurseries with real babies in them—babies that can cry—and there is a five-room model house, a hospital, and a section where they train nurses. They use all these things really to _teach_, and this is in addition to languages and the usual unpractical stuff. They teach librarians’ work, shorthand, typewriting, bookbinding, costume-designing, and dressmaking. Why, Jane, the girls are taught to make their own clothes. Every girl is expected to make her own graduation dress, and only a few of the dresses cost more than a dollar apiece. I’ll bet you wouldn’t like that part of it!" Even his social life served subtly to confirm him, during this period, in the opinions he had brought to it. He mistrusted combinations of capital, because he thought they tended to restrain honest trade, but he believed such combinations could properly and effectively be curbed by legislation, and he had a fine respect for such of his acquaintances as had made their own money by building up their own industries. He doubted certain men in whose hands lay the administration of government, but he was sure that the cure for this was the election of honorable men. He brought to New York, and long retained, what he called a muscular Christianity (he had read Kingsley), and, under its control, he sought a remedy for the world’s evils that he could synthesize with, a respect for authority and an acceptance of the dogma that the individual man is nothing and the omnipotent Deity everything. He used often to be invited to dinners at the Ruysdaels’ when there was no other guest, because Ruysdael liked this earnest lad and enjoyed long evening talks with him. On one such occasion, his host, little, sallow, with almond eyes that gave him a strangely Japanese appearance, fell to talking of these questions while the two men sat over a glass of port—for Ruysdael liked the old-fashioned English custom of after-dinner port—in the candle-lit, oak-paneled dining-room. "I can’t understand," said Ruysdael, "the shortsightedness of these really honest men who call property a crime." "They call it that," said Luke, "because it’s the result of profit." "Yes, but what’s profit?" "Selling dear what you buy cheap, I suppose."