My promise to Mr. Richards brought more than one result. The first of them was a serious quarrel with my Aunt Selina. Her horror at the idea of my spending the summer at a slum-settlement was beyond curbing. She had planned that I should accompany her and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen upon a trip to Europe. They did not need me; they would be in no way dependent on my company ... and I flatly declined. Aunt Selina, outraged at my actual intentions, left for France a week earlier than she had expected—and, in high indignation, gave me leave to do "whatever I pleased by way of disgracing her reputation."

Her letter from the steamer warned me to bathe every day in very hot water, lest I should be contaminated by the filth of that section of the city which I had chosen for my summer home ... and to be sure and give her warmest regards to that delightful Mr. Trevelyan!

I lost no time in moving into Mr. Richards' company at the East Side settlement. I was given a room there which was small, dark, but neat and comfortable enough. College had no sooner closed than I was settled in it, ready for the two months of work which had been allotted me.

In return for my board and lodgings, the settlement demanded all my time. There was hardly an hour which was not given to some sort of club or class, rehearsal or supervision or gymnastic training. Almost immediately after breakfast the playground work began; by noon I was helping a crowd of little ragamuffins to forget the heat in the splashing fun of the swimming pool, in the basement. In the afternoon there were classes for young boys who needed tutoring—hungry-eyed, eager little fellows who reminded me of what I must have been when I was their age.

I would not have you believe that I was readily sympathetic with every case I met. These boys and girls—though I rarely had to do with the latter—were all Jewish. The appearance of some of them would perhaps have justified my aunt's antipathy to the East Side. Those that were new to the settlement, I noticed, were shabby, dull, rough of speech, surly of manners. It would need a few weeks before I could see how subtle, yet how fundamental, were the changes which the settlement would have wrought in them.I was shy, too, in the presence of so many boys: shy of their hastily-offered friendship, their rushing eagerness to bring me into all their schemes and boyish dreams. But I was still young enough to know those dreams upon my own account: young enough to feel with little Mosche, a cripple, who wanted so much to become an expert at the swinging of Indian clubs, and who was forever dropping the heavy things in clumsy weakness; young enough to realize how much his mother's love meant to thirteen-year-old Frank Cohen, who had been caught stealing fruit from a corner grocery and was "on parole."

But the feeling in itself was not enough, evidently. I must try and try to make that feeling eloquent—to make these boys feel, in turn, the sureness and helpfulness of my understanding. Sometimes it was torture. It is harder to conquer shyness than to slap a dragon.

Mr. Richards saw this in me—watched the struggle, appreciated it. He spoke of it to me, once, and I did not hesitate to tell him how I felt. How inadequate, how chagrined and humbled in the face of all the poverty and suffering which life down here disclosed.

"It was the same when I first came down here," he said to me in turn. "But I gained courage. Thank God for that!"He said it quietly, but there was a good deal of fervor in the tones. It surprised me, somehow, because, I had never before heard him mention the name of the Deity. It gave me a new question to ask.

"Why is it that you don't lay more stress on religion down here? Don't the boys and girls need it?"

"Need it? Who doesn't?" A shadow crossed his face. His vivacity gave way for a moment before deep thoughtfulness. "But they get all they need, these kids. They are mostly all of them members of strictly orthodox Jewish families. Religion is given them at all hours in their own homes. Many of them get more of it than they can ever need. They get so much of it that they flee from it, just anxious for the freedom of the streets and the novelty of the bar room and the brothel and the gambling den. I have made investigations. I know that half of the East Side boys who land in the police court have been driven there by the religious strictness of their parents."

"Mr. Richards," I began ... but stopped in dismay. What I had been about to say was no more nor less than a hot, strong denial of his opinion. I felt sure he was wrong—and yet it seemed humorous to me that I, who a year ago, had hated all things Jewish, was now defending all the worth and venerability of its ritual.

"I do not agree with you altogether," I said lamely. "But ... but still, don't think I am a very enthusiastic Jew. Because I'm not."

"Aren't you? Why not?"

I did not answer—had no answer to make, in fact. I did not want to tell him of my aunt, of her influence, of my own cowardice. But, looking at me, I think he did guess something of the longing I had had ... something of that strange night when I had stood outside the synagogue and heard the music coming from within the depths of its golden haze. For he put his hand on my shoulder and bade me think for a moment why I was not a Jew in spirit as well as in name.

"You're not a snob," he said, trying to help me. "You're not thinking that, because your religion is in the minority in the midst of a Christian land, it is necessarily an ignominy to be a Jew—and to act as one."

My silence held. I let him go on talking. "Anyhow, you need religion. Every man does to a variable extent. I should feel sorry for the man who didn't. And do you mind my telling you—" he paused only for a second—"that you are one of those who need it most?"I hung my head. He had hit so truly upon what was right, what was most secret in me.... I could not ask him how he had guessed it, I remembered his assertion that he knew men—all men—and saw now that he had not been boasting.

He went on, presently, to explain that religion was a thing for the fathers and mothers and rabbis to teach to the children—not for the settlement to teach them. He knew that boys needed the guidance of religion ... but he felt that it was supplied in even too large doses already.

"The pity of it is," he said in closing, "that wherever Jewish children turn away from the faith of their fathers, they have nothing to turn towards next. They are at sea ..." he gave me another of his quick, deep set glances ... "and that applies to rich and poor alike. Christians forget their religion when they feel they have outgrown it ... because they have lost interest in it. Jews forsake theirs but never forget it. Under certain circumstances they grow impatient with it, slink from the inconveniences which it entails ... but their hearts are always desperate for the Faith. It is a hidden loneliness, a stifled longing to them."

I thought of Aunt Selina and wondered if she had ever felt that loneliness, that longing, as I had. I could hardly imagine her happy in devoutness to Judaism. It was so comical, I laughed aloud ... and got up and left Mr. Richards, lest he should ask me at what I was laughing.

It was his remark about Jewish children getting all the religion they need which nettled me the most. I felt that I would like to go out upon the streets and see for myself. The streets are the East Side's parliament, its court of law and high opinion.

They were hot and glaring with the noonday sun when first I appealed to them. Their pavements, white and littered with unspeakable confusion, gave off a dancing wave of heat. Old women, squatting on their doorsteps, their coarse wigs low upon perspiring foreheads, dozed and woke and gabbled to each other and dozed again. Old men, with long grey beards, long, tousled hair and melancholy eyes shuffled listlessly up and down, stopping only to make way for playing children or to pat them on the head. The gutters had their Jewish peddlers, each window its fat Jewish matron who leaned upon a cushioned window-sill and gazed apathetically at nothing. There was a Babel of Yiddish and Russian and guttural English. At one corner there was a crap-game going on in full sight of the policeman across the street. Young men of my age were in it; youths with mean, furtive faces and laughs that were cruel and raucous.

So this was Judea? This was where religion played too strong a part ... where parents and rabbis taught so fully to their charges the word and the comfort of God? It did not seem so to me. It seemed all hateful, smeared, repellant. And, with the question unanswered, I fled from it.

But the next morning, in the settlement playground, something happened which began the solution for me. It was an accident and I regretted it for a long while, feeling that it was my fault.

I had been teaching little Frank Cohen some tricks on the horizontal bar. Frank, the boy on parole for petty theft, was daring in this gymnastic work. No sooner was my back turned on him than he tried one of the tricks without my help. His fingers slipped, he fell heavily from the bar to the ground. When we picked him up, his arm was found to be broken.

We got him home in Mr. Richards' little run-about, and put the boy to bed. The doctor set his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's mother here, and, later on, his father who, having heard of the accident, came rushing upstairs from his bakery shop. They were a nervous, frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my lungs were capable of to assure them that their son would soon recover the use of his arm and be out of his bandage.

As I left their stuffy little flat, they were reciting some Hebrew prayers of gratitude. Tears were on the cheeks of both of them, and their eyes were uplifted to a God I could not know. I went downstairs bitterly conscious of that.

And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, his arm in a sling, but the hero of his comrades, came again to the settlement, I sought him out and made an especial friend of him. Of what that friendship should become I had then no plan.