With an effort she turned her attention from this confused tumult in her ears, and put out her hand, rather at random, for an introduction to talk. "You spoke, back there in the pergola, of another kind of beauty--I didn't know what you meant." He answered at once, with his usual direct simplicity, which continued to have for Sylvia at this period something suspiciously like the calmness of a reigning sovereign who is above being embarrassed, who may speak, without shamefacedness, of anything, even of moral values, that subject tabu in sophisticated conversation. "Ah, just a notion of mine that perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility,' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty." Sylvia looked at him, astonished. "Beauty?" "Why yes, beauty isn't only a matter of line and color, is it? There's the desire for harmony, for true proportions, for grace and suavity, for nobility of movement. Perhaps the lack of those qualities is felt in human lives as much as on canvases ... at least perhaps it may be felt in the future." "It's an interesting idea," murmured Sylvia, "but I don't quite see what it means, concretely, as applied to our actual America." He meditated, looking, as was his habit when walking, up at the trees above them. "Well, let's see. I think I mean that perhaps our race, not especially inspired in its instinct for color and external form, may possibly be fumbling toward an art of living. Why wouldn't it be an art to keep your life in drawing as well as a mural decoration?" He broke off to say, laughing, "I bet you the technique would be quite as difficult to acquire," and went on again, thoughtfully: "In this modern maze of terrible closeness of inter-relation, to achieve a life that's happy and useful and causes no undeserved suffering to the untold numbers of other lives which touch it--isn't there an undertaking which needs the passion for harmony and proportion? Isn't there a beauty as a possible ideal of aspiration for a race that probably never could achieve a Florentine or Japanese beauty of line?" He cast this out casually, as an idea which had by chance been brought up to the top by the current of the talk, and showed no indication to pursue it further when Sylvia only nodded her head. It was one of the moments when she heard nothing but the brazen clangor of "the wedding is on the twenty-first," and until the savage constriction around her heart had relaxed she had not breath to speak. But that passed again, and the two sauntered onward, in the peaceable silence which was one of the great new pleasures which Page was able to give her. It now seemed like a part of the mellow ripeness of the day.