I think it was rather foolish of me to tackle it in the
beginning. I haven't brains enough. Those boys may be flotsam and jetsam
and all that, but they know more about patriotism than I do. Why, one
little Italian, the cutest thing, with dimples and curly hair, told me
more about country-love than I could have thought up in a month. He says,
isn't it patriotic for them to come here and pick up all the good they
can, and take it back to enrich their own country? And when you come
right down to it, isn't it? Anyhow, the little Italians and Mexicans and
Jews and I have organized an Irish-American Baseball Team, and I suppose
we are amalgamating something into something. I think they are
amalgamating me. I feel terribly amalgamated right now."

"I am not in sympathy with the club idea," said Hiltze thoughtfully, as
they turned down Broadway toward the Grant. "It is such a treat to find
your kind of woman in this--I mean, the womanly kind--I abhor the
high-brow women that are so full of forward movement they can't settle
down to pal around comfortably and be human."

Eveley, too, was kindling with the charm of a common interest and
enthusiasm. Nolan took a very masculine stand on the subject. He said
bruskly that the growth of Americanization must come from Americans. He
said you couldn't cram American ideals into the foreign-born until the
home-born lived them. And he said the way to "teach Americanization was
by being a darned good American yourself inside and outside and all the
way through." Which may have been good sense, but was no help in the
forward movement.

So Eveley looked upon Mr. Hiltze with great friendliness and sympathy,
though she did glance up at the National Building as they went by,
noticing the light in Nolan's window, wondering if he was working
hard--and if the work necessitated the presence of the new, good-looking
stenographer the firm had lately acquired.

"Now, my idea of Americanization," Mr. Hiltze was saying when she finally
tore her thoughts away from the National Building, "is pure personal
effort. You take a club, and mix a lot of nationalities, and types, and
interests up together--they work upon one another, and work upon you, and
you get nowhere. But take an individual. Get chummy with him. Be with
him. Study him. Make him like you--interest him in your work, and your
sport, and your life--and there you have an American pretty soon. Club
work is not definite, not decisive. It is the pe