“What about? I must seem as bad as a complete reading course shipped on without warning,” he began, playing with pebbles, “but do you know what I was thinking, Thurley? That the art vanguard are certain to succeed, that this time of strife should not be for merely freedom of seas and colony disputes—it is the time of discord in which all matters shall have their hearing. And then, one sees absurd glimpses now and then that make one want to shout for joy—” “What? “Oh, a life insurance agent with a well worn copy of Keats in his inner pocket or the apparently frivolous hairdresser who reads Ruskin’s essays with the girl who sells fountain pens during lunch hour—or a very famous prima donna who finally admits that the shadow can never be the substance and that works without faith are dead, too!” Thurley was thinking in disconnected fashion. “Tell me, will the war level class as well, so that it will result in there being no very rich or no poor?” He shook his head. “We must always have wealth demonstrate herself with freedom; we must always have class. Let each man be what he was best intended; we cannot have one class, one rule, one creed any more than one dimension. The Cause who made such eternal contrasts as the snowbound north and orchid-decorated tropics, the sagebrush desert and the French vineyards—has the example not been set us for all time? There must be wealth and its opposite poverty and the sunny, useful medium running between the two and understanding each alike. Remember, player and worker are like the wings of a bird, equal and necessary. Class must exist the same as vicarious atonement—the mother bearing the child, soldiers fighting for stay-at-homes. The ancient but sometimes forgotten or denied unity of the race is the belief in immortality.” It was dark; the sea with the white rocks rising out of the water here and there gave the effect of the black and white cathedral front at Siena. Hobart lit their lanterns and urged a homeward journey. “I don’t want to go,” Thurley begged. “Tell me more—” “Yet you try to make me think you do not believe my vision,” he said, “that you will not be like the soldier in the old song, who did not halt but ‘he gave the bridle-reins another shake.’” “Tell me why artists have different lives from the world in general,” she retorted.