“It makes me think,” he answered her at once, his eyes on the haze caught like a dream in the tender green of the budding trees,—­“it makes me think of a half-naked, sweating man, far underground in black night, striking at a rock with a pick.”

If he had burst into loud profanity, the effect could not have been more shocking. “Oh!” said Sylvia, vexed and put out.  She began to walk forward.  Morrison in his turn gave an exclamation which seemed the vent of long-stored exasperation, and said with heat:  “Look here, Page, you’re getting to be a perfect monomaniac on the subject!  What earthly good does it do your man with a pick to ruin a fine moment by lugging him in!”

They were all advancing up the avenue now, Sylvia between the two men.  They talked at each other across her.  She listened intently, with the feeling that Morrison was voicing for her the question she had been all her life wishing once for all to let fly at her parents’ standards:  “What good did it do anybody to go without things you might have?  Conditions were too vast for one person to influence.”

“No earthly good,” said Page peaceably; “I didn’t say it did him any good.  Miss Marshall asked me what all this made me think of, and I told her.”

“It is simply becoming an obsession with you!” urged Morrison.  Sylvia remembered what Page had said about his irritation years ago when Austin had withdrawn from the collector’s field.

“Yes, it’s becoming an obsession with me,” agreed Page thoughtfully.  He spoke as he always did, with the simplest manner of direct sincerity.

“You ought to make an effort against it, really, my dear fellow.  It’s simply spoiling your life for you!”

“Worse than that, it’s making me bad company!” said Page whimsically.  “I either ought to reform or get out.”

Morrison set his enemy squarely before him and proceeded to do battle.  “I believe I know just what’s in your mind, Page:  I’ve been watching it grow in you, ever since you gave up majolica.”

“I never claimed that was anything but the blindest of impulses!” protested Page mildly.

“But it wasn’t.  I knew!  It was a sign you had been infected by the spirit of the times and had ‘caught it’ so hard that it would be likely to make an end of you.  It’s all right for the collective mind.  That’s dense, obtuse; it resists enough to keep its balance.  But it’s not all right for you.  Now you just let me talk for a few minutes, will you?  I’ve an accumulated lot to say!  We are all of us living through the end of an epoch, just as much as the people of the old regime lived through the last of an epoch in the years before the French Revolution.  I don’t believe it’s going to come with guillotines or any of those picturesque trimmings.  We don’t do things that way any more.  In my opinion it will come gradually, and finally arrive about two or three generations from now.  And it oughtn’t to come any sooner!