"But it wasn't. I knew! It was a sign you had been infected by the spirit of the times and had 'caught it' so hard that it would be likely to make an end of you. It's all right for the collective mind. That's dense, obtuse; it resists enough to keep its balance. But it's not all right for you. Now you just let me talk for a few minutes, will you? I've an accumulated lot to say! We are all of us living through the end of an epoch, just as much as the people of the old régime lived through the last of an epoch in the years before the French Revolution. I don't believe it's going to come with guillotines or any of those picturesque trimmings. We don't do things that way any more. In my opinion it will come gradually, and finally arrive about two or three generations from now. And it oughtn't to come any sooner! Sudden changes never save time. There's always the reaction to be gotten over with, if they're sudden. Gradual growths are what last. Now anybody who knows about the changes of society knows that there's little enough any one person can do to hasten them or to put them off. They're actuated by a law of their own, like the law which makes typhoid fever come to a crisis in seven days. Now then, if you admit that the process ought not to be hastened, and in the second place that you couldn't hasten it if you tried, what earthly use _is_ there in bothering your head about it! There are lots of people, countless people, made expressly to do whatever is necessary, blunt chisels fit for nothing but shaping grindstones. _Let them do it!_ You'll only get in their way if you try to interfere. It's not your job. For the few people capable of it, there is nothing more necessary to do for the world than to show how splendid and orderly and harmonious a thing life can be. While the blunt chisels hack out the redemption of the overworked (and Heaven knows I don't deny their existence), let those who can, preserve the almost-lost art of living, so that when the millennium comes (you see I don't deny that this time it's on the way!) it won't find humanity solely made up of newly freed serfs who don't know what use to make of their liberty. How is beauty to be preserved by those who know and love and serve her, and how can they guard beauty if they insist on going down to help clean out the sewers? Miss Marshall, don't you see how I am right? Don't you see how no one can do more for the common weal than just to live, as finely, as beautifully, as intelligently as possible? And people who are capable of this noblest service to the world only waste themselves and serve nobody if they try to do the work of dray-horses."