He wondered if such cases were common.

If they were, he thought to himself that the man who threw the first stone was the first criminal of the world.

He realized the helplessness of the young things before forces of nature of which they were brought up in so much ignorance, and his soul rebelled.

He thought to himself that they should be armed from the beginning with wisdom.
He was relieved that at first he saw in none of the girl-faces before him anything which resembled in the slightest degree the expression which he had seen in Lucy Ayres's.

These girls, most of them belonging to the village (there were a few from outside, for this was an endowed school, ranking rather higher than an ordinary institution), revealed in their faces one of three interpretations of character.