Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/109

 Magnificent lads were the lads of the association, and not in the least bashful before the stranger. One saw in them the dawning spirit of the co-operatist.

I became, however, horribly weary of my part as associate sister, and was glad to sit down and play for the Phalanstery, and to kiss all the young girls (and glorious warm-hearted girls they are), and shake hands with the associate brothers and sisters, and leaving the Phalanstery with my friends, seat myself again quietly in the steam-boat on my way back to New York.

I was like the fishes in St. Anthony's sermon, not a morsel more converted than they were. Because, although I should lose all regard for myself if I did not believe that I was inwardly associated with the interests of humanity in every various sentiment of my being, in my prayers as well as in my work—did not feel myself to be a worker in the great Phalanstery of the human race—yet is my nature altogether opposed to association when brought into too near a proximity, or in outward life. And I would rather live in a cottage on the bleakest granite mountain of Sweden, alone by myself, and live on bread and water and potatoes (which I would boil for myself), than in a Phalanstery on the most fertile soil, in the midst of associated brethren and sisters, even if they were as agreeable as are they at this place. But that belongs to my individual character; I cannot live perfectly excepting in solitude. For the greater number of people, however, even the outward life of association is the happiest and the best. Association in that form which it assumes, for example, in this Phalanstery, is evidently doing a justice to many individuals which would never be done to them in the great social system as it is usually constructed. Thus, for example, there was here a man,