Sylvia looked at him, astonished.  “Beauty?”

“Why yes, beauty isn’t only a matter of line and color, is it?  There’s the desire for harmony, for true proportions, for grace and suavity, for nobility of movement.  Perhaps the lack of those qualities is felt in human lives as much as on canvases ... at least perhaps it may be felt in the future.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” murmured Sylvia, “but I don’t quite see what it means, concretely, as applied to our actual America.”

He meditated, looking, as was his habit when walking, up at the trees above them.  “Well, let’s see.  I think I mean that perhaps our race, not especially inspired in its instinct for color and external form, may possibly be fumbling toward an art of living.  Why wouldn’t it be an art to keep your life in drawing as well as a mural decoration?” He broke off to say, laughing, “I bet you the technique would be quite as difficult to acquire,” and went on again, thoughtfully:  “In this modern maze of terrible closeness of inter-relation, to achieve a life that’s happy and useful and causes no undeserved suffering to the untold numbers of other lives which touch it—­isn’t there an undertaking which needs the passion for harmony and proportion?  Isn’t there a beauty as a possible ideal of aspiration for a race that probably never could achieve a Florentine or Japanese beauty of line?” He cast this out casually, as an idea which had by chance been brought up to the top by the current of the talk, and showed no indication to pursue it further when Sylvia only nodded her head.  It was one of the moments when she heard nothing but the brazen clangor of “the wedding is on the twenty-first,” and until the savage constriction around her heart had relaxed she had not breath to speak.  But that passed again, and the two sauntered onward, in the peaceable silence which was one of the great new pleasures which Page was able to give her.  It now seemed like a part of the mellow ripeness of the day.

They had come to a bend in the slowly flowing river, where, instead of torch-bright maples and poplars, rank upon rank of somber pines marched away to the summit of a steeply ascending foothill.  The river was clouded dark with their melancholy reflections.  On their edge, overhanging the water, stood a single sumac, a standard-bearer with a thousand little down-drooping flags of crimson.

“Oh,” said Sylvia, smitten with admiration.  She sat down on a rock partly because she wanted to admire at her leisure, partly because she was the kind of a girl who looks well sitting on a rock; and as she was aware of this latter motive, she felt a qualm of self-scorn.  What a cheap vein of commonness was revealed in her—­in every one—­by the temptation of a great fortune!  Morrison had succumbed entirely.  She was nowadays continually detecting in herself motives which made her sick.

Page stretched his great length on the dry leaves at her feet.  Any other man would have rolled a cigarette.  It was one of his oddities that he never smoked.  Sylvia looked down at his thoughtful, clean face and reflected wonderingly that he seemed the only person not warped by money.  Was it because he had it, or was it because he was a very unusual person?