nd of a week he remarked:

"She is coming."

It was two or three days after that before I saw them walking down the
lane together.... She took a seat by the door--she takes it still, the
same seat. It was an ordeal for her; also for The Abbot who felt in a
sense responsible; also for me.... I could not begin all over again, in
justice to him. We would have to continue his work and the little girl's
and gradually draw the new one into an accelerating current. We called
her The Valley-Road Girl. She suffered. It was very strange to her. She
had been at school eleven years. I did not talk stars; in fact, I fell
back upon the theme of all themes to me--a man's work, the meaning of
it; what he gets and what the world gets out of it; intimating that this
was not a place to learn how to reach the book and story markets. I said
something the first day, which a few years ago I should have considered
the ultimate heresy--that the pursuit of literature for itself, or for
the so-called art of it, is a vain and tainted undertaking that cannot
long hold a real man; that the real man has but one business: To awaken
his potentialities, which are different from the potentialities of any
other man; to express them in terms of matter the best he can, the
straightest, simplest way he can. I said that there is joy and
blessedness in doing this and in no other activity under the sun; that
it is the key to all good; the door to a man's religion; that work and
religion are the same at the top; that the nearer one reaches the top,
the more tremendous and gripping becomes the conception that they are
one; finally that a man doing his own work for others, losing the sense
of self in his work, is touching the very vitalities of religion and
integrating the life that lasts.

I have said this before in this book--in other books. I may say it
again. It is the truth to me--truth that the world is in need of. I am
sorry for the man who has not his work. A man's work, such as I mean, is
production. Handling the production of others in some cases is
production. There are natural orderers and organisers, natural
synthesisers, shippers, assemblers, and traffic masters. A truth is true
in all its parts; there are workmen for all the tasks.

The Valley-Road Girl's work, in the first days, reminded me of my own
early essay classes. Old friends were here again--Introduction,
Discussion, Conclusion. Her things were rigid, mental. I could see where
they woul