A NARROW beam of yellow light against the satin surface of purplish gray wood, wood become soft of texture, touched with these delicate shades of color. The light from above falls straight down the face of a great heavy beam of the wood. Or is it marble rather than wood, marble touched also by the delicate hand of time? I am perhaps dead and in my grave. No, it cannot be a grave. Would it not be wonderful if I had died and been buried in a marble sepulchre, say on the summit of a high hill above a city in which live many beautiful men and women? It is a grand notion and I entertain it for a time. What have I done to be buried so splendidly? Well, never mind that. I have always been one who wanted a great deal of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it. I am buried magnificently in a marble sepulchre cut into the side of a large hill, near the top. On a certain day my body was brought hither with great pomp. Music played, women and children wept and strong men bowed their heads. Now on feast days young men and women come up the hillside to look through a small glass opening left in the side of my burial place. It must be through the opening the yellow light comes. The young men who come up the hillside are wishing they could be like me, and the young and beautiful women are all wishing I were still alive and that I might be their lover. How splendid! What have I done? The last thing I remember I was working at that place where so many kegs of nails had to be rolled down an incline. I was full of beer too. What happened after that? Did I save a besieged city, kill a dragon like Saint George, drive snakes out of the land like Saint Patrick, inaugurate a new and better social system, or what could I have done? I am somewhere in a huge place. Perhaps I am standing in that great cathedral at Chartres, the cathedral that Judge Turner told me about when I was a lad and that I myself long afterward saw and that became for me as it has been for many other men and women the beauty shrine of my life. It may be that I am standing in that great place at midnight alone. It cannot be that there is any one with me for I feel very lonely. A feeling of being very small in the presence of something vast has taken possession of me. Can it be Chartres, the Virgin, the woman, God’s woman? What am I talking about? I cannot be in the cathedral at Chartres or buried splendidly in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city. I am an American and if I am dead my spirit must now be in a large half-ruined and empty factory, a factory with cracks in the walls where the work of the builders was scamped, as nearly all building was scamped in my time.