“I somehow think,” she ventured timidly, “that yours would be classic.”

Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify.  He was impatient always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost irritably.  “I only meant that I see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle.  There’s reward, I suppose, in seeing anything.  But about those more delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think that you don’t half realize, in a country like this, how much there is to make up.”

“Is there anything really to make up?” she asked.

“Oh, so much!  Freedom from old habits, inherited problems:  look at the absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as education!  Here you can’t even conceive it—­the schools have been on logical lines from the beginning, or almost.  Political activity over there is half-strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion; here it doesn’t even impede the circulation!  Conceive any Church, or the united Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct of the common schools of Ontario!  How would the people take it?  With anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense.  ’By all mean let the ministers serve education on the School Boards,’ they would say, ’by election like other people’—­an opportunity, by the way, which has just been offered to me.  I’m nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett, the tanner, who is leaving the town.  I shall do my best to get in, too; there are several matters that want seeing to over there.  The girls’ playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring.”

“You should get in without the least difficulty.  Oh, yes there is something in a fresh start:  we’re on the straight road as a nation, in most respects; we haven’t any picturesque old prescribed lanes to travel.  So you think that makes up?”

“It’s one thing.  You might put down space—­elbow-room.”

“An empty horizon,” Advena murmured.

“For faith and the future.  An empty horizon is better than none.  England has filled hers up.  She has now—­these,” and he nodded at a window open to the yellow west.  Advena looked with him.

“Oh, if you have a creative imagination,” she said “like Wallingham’s.  But even then your vision must be only political economic, material.  You can’t conceive the—­flowers—­that will come out of all that.  And if you could it wouldn’t be like having them.”

“And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in England!  His chance of significance and success!  And the splendid, buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the plenty of things!”