And so I say to her: “Do you think it has cost me nothing to struggle up through the dust and the dead grass and walk beside you? Do you think it has cost me nothing of pain to beat with my poor bare knuckles through the years?” But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them. But I am determined and I say: “Last March you came galloping up the Northwest Road on your white pony, and I was buried too near the highway to sleep, with such glory going by. A man may hardly expect to live again beyond the life of that little earth that surrounds his bones, and feeds the roots of the nearest tree. He may, perhaps give life through the leaves of that tree to the locust in the bark, or to the squirrel in the branches, but your song came past my grave like a fairy’s breath, and my ashes are again man or fire or weed or living thorns, or what you will them to be. If you will have nothing of a man, why give life to his dust?” But when I say such things to Avanel, she does not hear them. I am a gauche beau, that is all.... The mists sweep down upon us, and we are on the very eastern edge of Chaos, where it storms in upon the shore of created things. And Avanel’s eyes are sleepy and her voice is faint and far away. But she says: “Do you think I dance for temporal Springfield, or make my pony dance for such a city? We dance for an audience of the great deep.” Looming across the gulf is the gigantic porch of the Palace of Eve, its pillars reaching up into the highest clouds of the storm, pillars that are Doric, archaic, immemorial. And out of the gulf between rises the vague splendor of Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep. Avanel says:— “Any one with Daniel Boone’s hunting knife in her belt needs no pompous false prophets of democracy to tell her the road to freedom. In this gulf alone is freedom, if it is to be found, and in this gulf only, is tomorrow.” And as she speaks Avanel’s Dream City of the Great Deep takes form and is a picture of the Springfield we have left behind, but utterly transcendent, with the Sunset Towers in jewelled glory, with the Truth Tower like a pillar hewn from the white mountains of the sun, and around the town, star shaped double walls, with the pillar oaks between them. But even that dream crumbles and falls into nothingness. It becomes a great cloud plain, a bridge for spirit-feet, over the gulf. And then I see, as I sit lonely, the real dance and ceremonial of Hunter Kelly begin. I see Avanel on her dancing pony of white fire, surrounded by her devoted maidens, while dim and shadowy similitudes of branches of the Amaranth-Apple, made gigantic to shade the Universe, bend above the far off ministers of stately cosmic festival.