"As if He were near--still loving, still mediating--all earth's struggle and anguish passing through Him and becoming glorified with His pity and tenderness--before it reaches the eyes of the Father.... There is no other way. Man and woman must be One in Two--before Two in One. They must not war upon each other. Woman is receptive; man the origin. Woman is a planet cooled to support life; man, still an incandescent sun, generates the life." "That is clear and inspiring," she said. "I have always wanted it said just like that--that one is as important as the other in the evolution of the Individual----" "And for that Individual are swung the solar systems.... Look at Job--denuded of all but the Spirit. There is an Individual, and his story is the history of an Initiation.... We are coming to a time when Mind will operate in man and woman _conscious_ of the Soul. When that time comes true, how the progress to God will be cleared and speeded! It will be a flight----" "Instead of a crawl," she finished. They were alone in the big dining-room. Their voices could not have reached the nearest empty table. It was like a communion--their first communion. "I have felt it," she went on in a strange, low tone, "and heard the New Voices--Preparers of the Way. Sometimes it came to me in New York--the stirring of a great, new spiritual life. I have felt the hunger--that awful hollowness in the breasts of men and women, who turn to each other in mute agony, who turn to a thousand foolish sensations--because they do not realize what they hunger for. Their breasts cry out to be filled----" "And the Spirit cries out to flood in." "Yes, and the Spirit asks only for Earth-people to listen to their inner voices and love one another," she completed. "It demands no macerations, no fetters, no fearful austerities--only fineness and loving kindness." "How wonderfully they have come to me, too--those radiant moments--as I sat by my study window, facing the East," he whispered, not knowing what the last words meant to her. "How clear it is that all great and good things come with this soul-age--this soul-consciousness. I have seen in those lovely moments that Mother Earth is but one of many of God's gardens; that human life is but a day in a glorious culture-scheme which involves many brighter and brighter transplantings; that the radiance of the Christ, our Exemplar, but shows us the loveliness which shall be ours when we approach that lofty maturity of bloom----" A waiter entered with the word that a man from the city, Pere Rabeaut, desired to see Mr. Charter. Each felt the dreadfulness of returning so abruptly to sordid exterior consciousness--each felt the gray ghost of Pelée. "I shall go and see what is wanted, Miss Wyndam, and hurry back--if I may?" he said in a dull, tired tone.