"And you’re sure of your own Lohengrin?" She answered with a laughing air of challenge: "Perfectly. Whenever I give the right call I know he’ll be on the way." But this optimism didn’t weigh with me. Knowing all I did of love and life, the simple performance of simple tasks began to seem to me the most satisfying food for men. From nearly all of those whom I have quoted I made the synthetic gleaning of bees in a garden of flowers, building my own little cell for my soul and storing it. I needed such a cell. As May passed and June came in there was much in the trend of public life to make those, who had yearned and hoped and looked forward, cynical. The splendid spiritual freedom for which people had given their efforts and their sons was plainly not to be achieved. If the human race had moved higher it was not directly apparent at Versailles or anywhere else in the world; while in America, the home of the ideal, the land in which so many of the heart-stirring watchwords had been coined, passion, selfishness, distortion, extortion, and contortion were the chief signs of the new times. North of us Canada, hitherto so tranquilly industrious, was threatened with internal convulsion; south of us Mexico, which some of us had hoped was pacified, was prey to new distress. For me, to keep my sanity amid all this conflict of forces, a little secret temple of my own became a necessity, and to it I retired. It wasn’t much. Having built my shrine with what I had harvested from Drinkwater, Lydia, Mildred Averill, and the rest, I hid myself there with some half-dozen disciples. They were Bridget’s boy, the Finn’s two sons, and three or four of their chums whom they had brought in. Not only did their young affection give me something I sorely needed in my inner life, but I had the hope that, building on them, I was doing something for the future. Grown men and women were beyond my endeavors. These fresh souls, with their nearness to God, understood my faltering speech, which fell so far short of the ideas I was trying to interpret. They were simple ideas, connected with practical beauty. That is, with the Museum as what we called our clubhouse, all man’s treasures of material creative art were ours. These we were taking in their order, beginning with my own specialty of all things woven, from the crudest specimens of ancient linens up to the splendors of the tapestries, and going on to kindred and allied crafts. Not only art was involved in this, but history, biography, travel, romance, and everything else that adds drama to human accomplishment. To me, with the big void in my life, it was the most nearly satisfying thing I knew to reveal to these eager little minds something of the wonders with which the world was full; to them, with their ugly homes, cramped outlooks, and misshapen hopes, it was, I fancy, much what the marvels of the next world will be to those accustomed to the dwarfed conceptions of this.