The Master was a man of most unworldly wisdom. In his
youth a great traveller, he had brought home many
observations, a few views, and at least one theory. To him
the school was the most important of human institutions--more
vital even than the home, because it held the first real
experience of social contact, of free intercourse with other
minds and lives coming from different households and embodying
different strains of blood. "My school," said he, "is the
world in miniature. If I can teach these boys to study and
play together freely and with fairness to one another, I shall
make men fit to live and work together in society. What they
learn matters less than how they learn it. The great thing is
the bringing out of individual character so that it will find its
place in social harmony."

Yet never man knew less of character in the concrete than
Master Ward. To him each person represented a type--the
scientific, the practical, the poetic. From each one he
expected, and in each one he found, to a certain degree, the
fruit of the marked quality, the obvious, the characteristic.
But of the deeper character, made up of a hundred traits,
coloured and conditioned most vitally by something secret and
in itself apparently of slight importance, he was placidly
unconscious. Classes he knew. Individuals escaped him. Yet
he was a most companionable man, a social solitary, a friendly
hermit.

His daughter Dorothy seemed to me even more fair and
appealing by daylight than when I first saw her in the dusk.