Some days after this they drove one afternoon over the Blue Hills to the southern beach. Long white road--long white road--and on either hand pine and scrub, pine and scrub, and over all a vault of sky achingly blue. It was a lonely road, a road untravelled to-day, and the wind shook in the palmetto scrub. Small grey birds flitted before them, or cheeped from the tangled wood. It was a day for silence and they stayed silent so long that the negro driving, who was afraid of silence, broke it himself. He told them about things, and when they awoke and genially answered, he was happy and talked on to himself until they, too, were talking, when he lapsed into silence and contentment. The wind blew, the scrub rustled, the sky was sapphire--oh, sapphire! When they came after a good while to the South Beach, they left the surrey and the horse and the driver, in the shade of the trees that fringed the beach, and walked slowly a long way, over the firm sand. It stretched, a silver shore; the sun was westering, the great sea making a hoarse, profound murmur. They walked in silence, thinking their own thoughts. Before them, half-sunken in the sand, lay an old boat. When they came to it, they sat down upon its shattered, sun-dried boards, with the sand at their feet and the grave evening light stealing up and Mother Ocean speaking, speaking.... "In the last analysis it is," said Hagar, "a metaphysical adventure--a love-quest if you will. There is a passion of the mind, there is the questing soul, there is the desire that will have union with nothing less than the whole. I will think freely, and largely, and doing that, under pain of being false, I must act freely and largely, live freely and largely. Nor must I think one thing and speak another, nor must I be silent when silence betrays the whole.... And so woman no less than man comes into the open." "There is something that broods in this time," said Denny. "I do not know what it will hatch. But something vaster, something nobler...." Hagar let the warm sand stream through her fingers. "Oh, how blue is the sea.... Æons and æons and æons ago, when slowly, slowly life drew itself forth from such a sea as this into upper air--when Amphibian began to know two elements, how much richer was life for Amphibian, how great was the gain!... When, after æons and æons, there was all manner of warm-blooded life in woods like these behind us, or in richer woods ... and one day, dimly, dimly, some primate thought, and her children and grandchildren a little, little more consciously thought, and it spread.... To that tribe how strange a dawn! 'We are growing away from the four-footed--we are growing away from our sister the gibbon and our brother the chimpanzee--we are growing--we are changing--we feel the heavens over us and a strange new life within us--we are passing out, we are coming in--we need a new word....' And at last they called themselves _human_--æons ago...." "And now?"