Sylvia had found this wonderfully eloquent and convincing. She now broke in. "When I was a young girl in college, I used to have a pretentious, jejune sort of idea that what I wanted out of life was to find Athens and live in it--and your idea sounds like that. The best Athens, you know, not sensuous and selfish, but full of lovely and leisurely sensations and fine thoughts and great emotions." "It wasn't pretentious and jejune at all!" said Morrison warmly, "but simply the most perfect metaphor of what must have been--of course, I can see it from here--the instinctive sane effort of a nature like yours. Let's all try to live in Athens so that there will be some one there to welcome in humanity." Page volunteered his first contribution to the talk. "Oh, I wouldn't mind a bit if I thought we were really doing what Morrison thinks is our excuse for living, creating fine and beautiful lives and keeping alive the tradition of beauty and fineness. But our lives aren't beautiful, they're only easeful. They're not fine, they're only well-upholstered. You've got to have fitly squared and substantial foundations before you can build enduring beauty. And all this," he waved his hand around him at the resplendent, modern city, "this isn't Athens; it's--it's Corinth, if you want to go on being classic. As near as I can make out from what Sylvia lets fall, the nearest approach to Athenian life that I ever heard of, was the life she left behind her, her parents' life. That has all the elements of the best Athenian color, except physical ease. And ease is no Athenian quality! It's Persian! Socrates was a stone-cutter, you know. And even in the real Athens, even that best Athens, the one in Plato's mind--there was a whole class given over to doing the dirty work for the others. That never seemed to bother Plato--happy Plato! but--I'm sure I don't pretend to say if it ultimately means more or less greatness for the human race--but somehow since Christianity, people find it harder and harder to get back to Plato's serenity on that point. I'm not arguing the case against men like you, Morrison--except that there's only one of you. You've always seemed to me more like Plato than anybody alive, and I've regarded you as the most enviable personality going. I'd emulate you in a minute--if I could; but if mine is a case of mania, it's a genuine case. I'm sane on everything else, but when it comes to that--it's being money that I don't earn, but they, those men off there underground, do earn and are forced to give to me--when it comes to that, I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg. I don't blame you for being out of patience with me. As you say I only spoil fine minutes by thinking of it, and as you charitably refrained from saying, I spoil other people's fine moments by speaking of it."