"I sometimes think," said Hagar, "that the trouble with me is that I am too general. My own sharp inner struggle was for intellectual and spiritual freedom. I had to think away from concepts with which the atmosphere in which I was raised was saturated. I had to think away from creeds and dogmas and affirmations made for me by my ancestors. I had to think away from the idea of a sacrosanct Past and the virtue of Immobility;--not the true idea of the mighty Past as our present body which we are to lift and ennoble, and not Immobility as the supreme refusal to be diverted from that purpose,--but the Past, that is made up of steps forward, set and stubborn against another step, and Immobility blind to any virtue in Change. I had to think away from a concept of woman that the future can surely only sadly laugh at. I had to think away from Sanctions and Authorities and Taboos and Divine Rights--and when I had done so, I had to go back with the lamp of wider knowledge, deeper feeling, and find how organic and on the whole virtuous in its day was each husk and shell. The trouble was that in love with the lesser we would keep out the stronger day ... and there was everywhere a sickness of conflict. I had to think away from my own dogmatisms and intolerances. I'm still engaged in doing that.... What has come of it all is a certain universal feeling.... I'm not explaining very well what I mean, but--though I want to be able to do it--it is difficult for me to drive the lightning in a narrow track to a definite end. It's playing over everything." "I see what you mean. You're more the philosopher than the crusader. Well, we need philosophers, too!... I'm more, I think, the type that is sharpened to a point, that couches its lance for one Promised Land, which it believes is the key to many another. But I hold that it is better to move full-orbed, if you can." "I do not know--I do not know," said Hagar. "I try to plunge with my whole mind into some political or social theory, but I fail. Even the slow drawing-up of the submerged capacities in woman, even the helping in that,--which is greater than would be the discovery of Atlantis, which is greater than almost anything else,--cannot bring the ends together. Name everything and there is so much besides!" "There is such a thing," said Denny, "as going to the stake for what you know to be partial, only factors, scaffoldings, stairs to mount by.... Stairs and scaffoldings are necessary; therefore, die for them if need be." "I agree there," answered Hagar.