"Yes; we are more complex and flowing than that. But it was lovely. Do you remember the harvest home, and the masons, so absorbed and happy in their building ... like children, and yet conscious artists, buoyant, free--" Fay looked at her. "What," he said, "is _your_ vision of the country that is coming?" Her candid eyes met his. "I have no clear vision," she said. "Visions, too, are flowing. The vision of to-day is not that of yesterday and to-morrow's may be different yet. Moreover, I don't want to fix a vision, to mount it like a butterfly and keep it with the life gone out. We've done too much of that all along the way behind us. Vision grows, and who wishes to say 'Lo, the beautiful End!' There is no End. I do not wish a rigid mind, posturing before one altar-piece. Pictures dissolve and altars are portable." "Yes," said Denny, "but--" "Lily says she reads Vedanta. Well, it is the Yogi's _Neti--neti!_ Almost your only possible definition as yet is, 'Not this--not this!' The country that is coming--It is not capitalism, though capitalism is among its ancestors. It is not war, though in the past it warred. It is not ecclesiasticism, though ecclesiasticism, too, was an inn on its road. It is not sex-aristocracy, though that, too, is behind it; it is not preoccupation with sex at all. It is not sectionalism, nor nationalism, nor imperialism. It is not racial arrogance. It is not arrogance at all. It is not exploitation. It is not hatred. It is not selfishness. It is not lust. It is not bigotry. It is not ignorance, or pride in ignorance.--_Neti, neti!_... It is beauty--and truth.... And always greater.... And it comes by knowledge, out of which grows understanding, and by courage, out of which come great actions." She ceased to speak, and leaned back in her chair, her hand at the amethysts about her throat. Fay kept his eyes upon her. He was conscious of a resurgence of a morning of a couple of years before when he had cut from a magazine a page bearing a half-tone portrait and had pinned it above his book-shelf. HAGAR ASHENDYNE had said the legend below. The rustle of the palms outside his hut came to him, and the mist of early morning above the waters. The clock on Hagar's mantel-shelf struck ten with a silvery stroke. Denny started. "I've got to go--work's calling!" "I had rather hear you say, at ten o'clock, that sleep was calling," said Hagar. "You're working too hard, Rose says so, and I say so." She looked at him with friendliness deep and tender, soft and bright. "Almost Denny's only fault is that he makes his work his god rather than his servant. At times he's perilously near offering it a human sacrifice. Why will you, Denny?"