Thurley rose with sudden determination. Right always ends by acquiring might, she told herself, and if Bliss Hobart possessed a vision he, himself, was powerless to execute it. Player and worker were like the wings of a bird, he had said, equal and necessary ... then so were dreamer and doer. Thurley could _do_—her ancestors probably toddled about in sabots a few generations ago but she thanked heaven for the sturdy, unknown peasant strain in her which gave her the virility to act. Hobart was the patrician dreamer—yet even gold cannot be used in its purest state, it requires a sterner, coarser alloy before it becomes either practical or fully beautiful. “After the boys fall out of step,” Thurley informed the little lake, “we must fall in step—teach them to go forth once more on a time clock.” “Gray angels”—that was what the people in the vanguard, not only the art vanguard but in all avenues of progress, should be called,—people with enough of the divine in them to have no fear and to believe in the ultimate success of their ideals, and enough of the human sinner to understand the best earthly way to go about it. Gray angels! The people who can do the needed drudgery which permits others to accomplish the toil-free feats; stay-at-homes were gray angels; the women who did not lift up their voices in egotistical speechmaking or in whines but who gave their sons and kept the home in which to welcome them back; those quiet, undersized little chaps with poor eyes or hollow chests who had quietly applied at recruiting stations only to be turned off with a laugh—they were gray angels, staying at the helm to do uninteresting routine which is always needed to keep things afloat, yet applauding those who have achieved the apparently bigger things; and it would be gray angels who should steady the army of men and women who should demand: “What next? We want another great task to do,” looking with scorn at a clerk’s white apron, an adding machine, a modest millinery store! The gray angels dyke a nation’s forceful common sense from becoming a flood of useless sentiment, expending itself no one knows where, lost to practical purposes. It would be the gray angels who would help win the violet crown because they gauge nothing in misleading blacks or whites, since life on this planet is not expressed in harsh, sweeping tones, but in neutral grays, partaking of both white and black, now foggy and bewildering, now serene and sweetly sad with lavender veiling, or rosy flecked and hopeful. Bliss was a gray angel—Ernestine, Polly, Collin and Caleb had the possibilities of becoming them. ... “I believe I’m a gray angel, too,” Thurley thought with sudden delight. CHAPTER XXXVI