Page:The Fun of It.pdf/69

Rh know that everything I have studied that I was in­terested in has given me something.

I returned to Boston and Harvard for the next summer. My sister was teaching and I wanted to try it also. But, as in the west, I did various things, finally ending at a settlement house, as a novice social worker.

The place where I found myself was Denison House, Boston’s second oldest social center. It stood in a little island of residences surrounded by warehouses and other buildings in a lower corner of town. The island had at one time been a rather nice section and many of the tenements, homes of well-to-do people. The stone fronts of some of the houses, the high ceilings and curving bannis­ters inside were mute reminders of a more glorious past.

The people whom I met through Denison House were as interesting as any I have ever known. The neighborhood was mostly Syrian and Chinese with a few Italians and Irish mixed in. I had never been privileged to know much about how people other than Americans lived. Now I discovered manner and modes very different from those with which I was familiar. Under my very nose Orien­tal ideas and the home-grown variety were trying to get along together. The first time I saw, sitting on a modern gas stove, one of the native clay cook­ing dishes used for centuries by the Syrians, I felt I was seeing tangible evidence of the blending process.