Sudden changes never save time.  There’s always the reaction to be gotten over with, if they’re sudden.  Gradual growths are what last.  Now anybody who knows about the changes of society knows that there’s little enough any one person can do to hasten them or to put them off.  They’re actuated by a law of their own, like the law which makes typhoid fever come to a crisis in seven days.  Now then, if you admit that the process ought not to be hastened, and in the second place that you couldn’t hasten it if you tried, what earthly use is there in bothering your head about it!  There are lots of people, countless people, made expressly to do whatever is necessary, blunt chisels fit for nothing but shaping grindstones. Let them do it! You’ll only get in their way if you try to interfere.  It’s not your job.  For the few people capable of it, there is nothing more necessary to do for the world than to show how splendid and orderly and harmonious a thing life can be.  While the blunt chisels hack out the redemption of the overworked (and Heaven knows I don’t deny their existence), let those who can, preserve the almost-lost art of living, so that when the millennium comes (you see I don’t deny that this time it’s on the way!) it won’t find humanity solely made up of newly freed serfs who don’t know what use to make of their liberty.  How is beauty to be preserved by those who know and love and serve her, and how can they guard beauty if they insist on going down to help clean out the sewers?  Miss Marshall, don’t you see how I am right?  Don’t you see how no one can do more for the common weal than just to live, as finely, as beautifully, as intelligently as possible?  And people who are capable of this noblest service to the world only waste themselves and serve nobody if they try to do the work of dray-horses.”

Sylvia had found this wonderfully eloquent and convincing.  She now broke in.  “When I was a young girl in college, I used to have a pretentious, jejune sort of idea that what I wanted out of life was to find Athens and live in it—­and your idea sounds like that.  The best Athens, you know, not sensuous and selfish, but full of lovely and leisurely sensations and fine thoughts and great emotions.”

“It wasn’t pretentious and jejune at all!” said Morrison warmly, “but simply the most perfect metaphor of what must have been—­of course, I can see it from here—­the instinctive sane effort of a nature like yours.  Let’s all try to live in Athens so that there will be some one there to welcome in humanity.”

Page volunteered his first contribution to the talk.  “Oh, I wouldn’t mind a bit if I thought we were really doing what Morrison thinks is our excuse for living, creating fine and beautiful lives and keeping alive the tradition of beauty and fineness.  But our lives aren’t beautiful, they’re only easeful.  They’re not fine, they’re only well-upholstered.  You’ve got to have fitly squared and substantial foundations before you