his age was the Dawn of
Love....

Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things.
Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently seemed to beat and
fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was including
Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his appeal. Rachel listened silently;
Edith watched Karenin and very deliberately avoided Kahn's eyes.

'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this sort
of thing. I know that there is a vast release of love-making in the
world. This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone about
the world, this Efflorescence, has of course laid hold of that. I know
that when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that to
mean that the world is set free for love-making. Down there,--under
the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your
half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world
dissolving into a luminous haze of love--sexual love.... I don't think
you are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and
you see life--ardently--with the eyes of youth. But the power that has
brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness of
the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense and awful future of
our race, is riper and deeper and greater than any such emotions....

'All through my life--it has been a necessary part of my work--I have
had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that perfect
freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race. I
can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste; "Let us
sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful." . . . The orgy is
only beginning, Kahn.... It was inevitable--but it is not the end of
mankind....

'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time
that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself
as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, were
born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary
and died. Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle,
river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring
wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though they
had never been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights played
and vanished. And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a
question and hands that were a demand and