It is late, and Avanel insists on going on, in the intoxication of weariness, and will not let me take her to her house on Mulberry Boulevard. She leads me into the very thick of the great forest of Sunset Towers again, now “midnight towers,” she says to me, with her face flushed to a deep crimson from utter weariness, and her eyes heavy with the desire for sleep, and her determined little feet still dancing nervously on. And this is what her soul says to me, and what we say to one another, in our fashion, as we whirl on: “Not until another civilization rises here, will there be a rival form to these towers. It is only a matter of years till the type be perfected by John Emis or the Thibetan Boy or their kind. The first generation of ripened builders came a century ago. That was our Early Renaissance. At last our High Renaissance has come. The ripe architectural genius will appear who will gather to himself all that can be known of beam and girder and truss, of foundation and wind pressure and the distribution of light, all that can be learned about hollow brick and tile, of pillar and elevator and fireproofing. He will understand the chances peculiar to his materials and town. His imagination will be a smelter, a mastered volcano. He will have visions of welded steel that will put all men to shame but the builders of the Parthenon, the hewers of the Sphinx. There shall be no borrowings from Paris or Rome. “The least minor decoration shall reflect the majesty of the dream, as the Gothic altar carving repeated the flying buttress and the spires leaping heavenward. “Because we take our pleasure at the feet of the Sunset Towers, now ‘midnight towers’ while the midnight stars go by, they shall be reembodied and perfected in the sons that shall spring from them like light. “They are the rose and gold progenitors of Springfield, the rainbow patriarchs of Springfield. They stand proudly through the night and the lighted streets below them are like a carpet of goldenrod and dandelions unrolled at their feet. Their heads are so far in the heavens they converse with their serene sister the moon. They look out together to the Springfield University and the Sangamon River where the bridges sweep to the north, sparkling threads in the mist. They look south to the Street of Past History that bends around till it meets them. “Who shall dispraise the excellence of our towers? They look west with all the pioneers, and the very soul of far off, west-going Daniel Boone is in them. “We take our pleasure, honorable, or philosophical, innocent or stupid or guilty, at their feet, and where pleasure is, there art is born. Many songs shall be sung to them, many new names given to them. Their children shall rise up to call them blessed. Their children shall be a world-conquering city all about them, before the relentless sun looks down upon their ruins, before that blazing lion of time shall have eaten their bones of steel.