Despite her disappointing experience with the girls in her class, Fuller was not ready to relinquish her conviction that conversation was indeed what best loosened the ligaments of thought and trained the mind to leap. “Words are events,” Ursula K. Le Guin would write a century and a half later, “they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”
