"Drink your coffee and talk to the others while I copy it out," said Hagar. She rose and went to the desk in the smaller room. When she came back, Lily was dreaming with her eyes upon the forest bough, and the two men sat discussing Syndicalism. She laid a folded piece of paper upon the table beside Denny's hand. "There are only three verses." He opened the paper and read them. "Thank you, Hagar! You've struck it home." He refolded the paper and was about to put it in his pocket when John Fay held out his hand. "Mayn't I see it, too?" He looked at Hagar. "Yes, of course, if you wish." Fay read it, held the paper in his hand for a moment, then gave it back to Denny. "I wish I could write like that," he said. His tone was so oddly humble that Hagar laughed. "I wish that I could build great bridges across deep rivers!" she said. They sat and talked, and the poem gave leadings to their talk, though they did not speak of the poem. At first it was Fay, answering Hagar's questions, telling of the struggle of muscle and brain with the physical earth, of mountain-piercing, river-spanning, harbour-making. He was thirty-nine; he had been engineering, building in strange and desert places since he was a boy; he had a host of memories of struggles, now desperate and picturesque, now patient and drudging, grapples of mind with matter, first-hand encounters with solids and liquids and gases. He had had to manage men in order to manage these; he had had to know how to manage men. Born with an enquiring mind, he learned as he went along his governments and peoples, their customs, institutions, motor-faiths, strengths and weaknesses; also he knew the natural history of places, and loved Mother Earth and a good part of her progeny. He had also a defined, quizzical humour which saved the day for him when it grew too strenuous. He talked well, with a certain drawling fitness of phrase which brought Medway into Hagar's mind, but not unpleasantly. There had been much in Medway which she had liked. Fay was no monopolist. The talk went from one to another, and Denny drew more into it. He had been listening attentively to Fay. "It's your work," he said, "and it's tremendous and basic work. You've been doing it through the ages ever since it first occurred to us that we could lengthen an arm with a stick and crack a nut--or an enemy's head--with a stone. It's tremendous and basic still. And the people who work under your direction, and atom by atom give you power?" "Why, one day," said Fay, "they'll work as artists. A far day, doubtless, and there are degrees in artists; but I see no other conclusion. And to give the artist component in the mass of humanity a chance to strengthen and come out is, I take it, the tremendous and basic work to which we've all got to devote the next century or two." "Oh, you're all right!" said Denny. Hagar smiled. "My old 'News from Nowhere'--" "But with a difference," said Denny. "Morris's was an over-simplified dream."