“I haven’t seen Madame yet,” she said, “and I feel the greatest curiosity about her. She must be a remarkable woman by all accounts. Does she wear the same sort of dress as you do?” “No, she doesn’t, and it’s a great pity, for her influence would be very great with the other women. I suppose you’ll see her to-morrow evening. You’ll come to the Academy, won’t you?” “Yes, certainly, if Ezra is going. I should like to go ever so much and see all my neighbours, but perhaps he will be too tired. He does work dreadfully hard, it seems to me.” “He ought to do a little brain-work. Wright says nothing rests one like brain-work. He’s been doing a spell of that lately. He’s been writing an essay on ‘The Ultimate Perfection of Being.’ He’ll most likely read some of it to-morrow at the Academy.” “I shouldn’t think essays would be much use in planting corn,” said Olive rather tartly, remembering at what hour her husband had come from the harrowing. “Wright and I, we don’t believe in making a god of work. We have a much higher ideal of life than that. We don’t want anything sordid in our lives, Wright and I. We haven’t any sympathy with this restless striving to get on. One of the great advantages of Perfection City is that we all have time for the cultivation of our higher natures.” “Just now,” said Olive, “my husband seems to have no thought in his mind but the cultivation of that field over there. He is at work early and late. No person could possibly work harder for himself or his individual advantage than he does for the Community.” “There’s just a case in point,” remarked Mary Winkle complacently. “I always thought your husband very narrow in his views. He slaves away at this corn planting as if that were the chief end and object of his existence. It is all very well to work at times, but working in order to store up food for the body is the lowest possible form that human activity can take.” “It is the most indispensable form,” remarked Olive. “By no means,” replied Mary Winkle with precision. “That observation would seem to indicate that you are more narrow even than your husband. The body is merely the servant of the mind: the mind needs to be fed, and it is the food for the mind which your husband appears so careless about providing. Fortunately for Perfection City, Wright has taken thought on that subject. Wright has a very high standard of what is necessary for the mind.” “It appears to me,” said Olive with a snap of her black eyes and an ominous red spot on her cheeks, “that if we all lived up to your standard, it might very well happen that by next winter our minds might be uncomfortably full and our stomachs correspondingly empty. If Ezra did not plough and get his land ready for planting as fast as mortal man can, how is the land to be got ready? It doesn’t plough itself, does it, even at Perfection City?”