To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the community, every man and every woman had a separate house, as soon as the powers were mature. One of the horrors of the past out of which they had come was the intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, and the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes of servants or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could one find real solitude. In all human communities there are endless opportunities for social intercourse; opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was arranged in Limanora with a view to allowing and securing as frequent and as long solitudes as were consonant with the progress of the race. On the most prominent point of every house there was the representation of two climbing flowers; and if these hung drooping, colourless, and apart, everyone knew that the occupant desired seclusion; if they flushed with rose, stood up to the sun, and twined round each other, then was it known that human converse was permissible, if not desired. There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of spirit among all the people to touch into life at intervals the love of that definite and open intercourse so native to the human system. This inborn social faculty might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness from severing all ties. There were daily public duties that brought everyone into the knowledge and sight of his fellow-men, the rota of physical exercise at the centre of force, the flight-drill, the general meeting of the community, and the medical review. And every day and almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could go on in the magnificent baths, in the halls of recuperation, and in the valley of memories. There was no lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans together. But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly guarded and fostered, especially in the earlier stages of life. One of the greatest blunders they had to correct in their former civilisation had been gregarious education. Large families had been one of the consequences of a half-developed humanity, more kin to the animal world than to the spiritual. The lower a living thing is in the scale of life the more prolific it is, the more devoted to the mere function of keeping its species alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their existence by continual fission. Microbes become massive in their effects by the countless myriads each is capable of producing. The higher the organisation, the less is the energy that can be spared for generation, and the more capable is the offspring when matured of ensuring its own survival, of rising above and managing the laws of nature. Civilisation has not advanced far when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are the only purposes and functions of most life. To feed, to reproduce, to die, that is their history.