'And, without exactly knowing it, I suppose I've brought them all out here,' he continued, seeing that she drank it in thirstily, 'and-- somehow or other--you all have felt it and responded. It's not my doing, of course,' he added; 'it's simply that I'm the channel as it were, and Daddy, with his somewhat starved artist's hunger of mind, was the first to fill up. It's pouring through him now in a story, don't you see; but we're all in it--' 'In a way, yes, that's what I've felt,' Mother interrupted. 'It's all a kind of dream here, and I've just waked up. The unchanging village, the forests, the Pension with its queer people, the Magic Box--' 'Like a play in a theatre,' he interrupted, 'isn't it?' 'Exactly,' she laughed, yet half-seriously. 'While your husband is the dramatist that writes it down in acts and scenes. You see, his idea is, perhaps, that life as we know it is never a genuine story, complete and leading to a climax. It's all in disconnected fragments apparently. It goes backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out in a wumbled muddle, just anyhow, as it were. The fragments seem out of their proper place, the first ones often last, and _vice versa_. It seems inconsequential, because we only see the scraps that break through from below, from the true inner, deeper life that flows on steadily and dramatically out of sight. That's what he means by "out of the body" and "sleep" and "dreaming." The great pattern is too big and hidden for us to see it whole, just as when you knit I only see the stitches as you make them, although the entire pattern is in your mind complete. Our daily, external acts are the stitches we show to others and that everybody sees. A spiritual person sees the whole.' 'Ah!' Mother interrupted, 'I understand now. To know the whole pattern in my mind you'd have to get in sympathy with my thought below. Is that it?' 'Sometimes we look over the fence of mystery, yes, and see inside--see the entire stage as it were.' 'It _is_ like a great play, isn't it?' she repeated, grasping again at the analogy with relief. 'We give one another cues, and so on---' 'While each must know the whole play complete in order to act his part properly--be in sympathy, that is, with all the others. The tiniest details so important, too,' he added, glancing significantly at the needles on her lap. 'To act your own part faithfully you must carry all the others in your mind, or else--er--get your own part out of proportion.' 'It will be a wonderful story, won't it?' she said, after a pause in which her eyes travelled across the sunshine towards the carpenter's house where her husband, seen now in a high new light, laboured steadily.