"That's so wonderful about you. You seem to be always learning. And now you're going. I used to dread your going, but now it doesn't hurt me at all. . . . You will always have me to think gladly of you." "And I of you. . . . We've made the world richer by a friendship." "I want to say thank you," she said, "but I can't, not enough." "Of course you can't. . . . Come along." * * * In a few hours Serge was in the express for London. He had a portfolio of pictures and drawings, two bags, and one hundred and twenty pounds in notes. As the train passed out of the dingy murk and his eyes lighted on the green, undefiled country, he drew in great breaths and found it hard not to shout for joy in the new zest for adventure that had come to him. "That seraph notion," he thought, "I wonder where it comes from? That curious hunger for the state of childhood, the pretence that it is superior to adult life. . . . Surely it all comes from their incompetence in managing their affairs as men and women. They seem to lose their simplicity. I wonder why? . . . Old Lawrie must be right. Mind, body, spirit. You can't poison the spirit. That's God, and He's beyond contamination. Body and mind are the instruments of the spirit. Poison the mind and the body suffers. . . . That's right. Yes: old Lawrie's right. Fear of love and fear of death; the mind hemmed in and losing its bright power of reflection, so that it shows only a distorted image of life. . . . No wonder they hate life when it looks like that. . . . It can't go on for ever. The spirit must break through it all in time . . . in time." The train rushed along, and he began to think that perhaps the problem was being solved. When men had made it so easy to escape from their cities of captivity, would not their minds also be freed? Would there not be a gradual adjustment of mind to larger surroundings? Or were the minds of men so clothed with centuries of tyranny that swifter transportation also would be used as an instrument of slavery? . . . "No," he thought, "there is a deeper faith in men than they know. They endure heroically because they are sure that in the end their efforts will lead to deliverance."