scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquiry
was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin.
But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun.... The politics
and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were
only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about
the beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... 'Man lives in the dawn for
ever,' said Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning.
It begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and does
but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, which
would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the
commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream of the possibilities
in the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its
peace, these great mountains here seem but little things....'

Section 6

About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept among
his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and
some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty in
connection with the Moravian schools in the Labrador country and in
Greenland that Gardener knew would interest him. He remained alone for
a little while after that, and then the two women came to him again.
Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon
love and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of
India lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full
upon the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast
splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rush
of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet thread
into the gulfs below, and cease....

Section 7

For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked
of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the
abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now
only was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream that
generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on the
verge of attainment. To most of those who had sought it obstinately it
had brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and women
might hope for realised and triumphant love. T