one of the big
finishing schools. The message of it was that she was unbearably
restless, that her room-mate was restless. They were either out of all
truth and reason, or else the school was, and their life at home as
well. They had been brought up to take their place in that shattered
world called Society--winter for accomplishments, summers for mountain
and shore. They were very miserable and they seemed to sense the
existence of a different world.... Was there such a world? Was there
work for women to do? Was it all an un-mattered ideal that such a world
existed? This letter achieved an absolute free-hearted sincerity in the
final page or two--that most winning quality of the younger generation.

... Then, many people are whole-heartedly in love around the world.
Letters often bring in this reality, many calling for a wisdom that is
not of our dispensation.... It was from personal letters first of all
that I learned of the powerful corrective force, which is being
established against American materialism along the Western coast. There
is to-day an increasingly finer surface for the spiritual things of art
and life, the farther westward one travels across the States. It is a
conviction here that the vital magic of America's ideal, promulgated in
the small eastern colonies, will be saved, if at all, by the final stand
of its defenders with their backs to the Pacific.

All our East has suffered from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is
becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of
tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the
entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that
is _living spirit_ is being driven westward before gross Matter--westward
as light tends, as the progress of civilisation and extinction tends.

The gleam is in the West, but it faces the East. It is rising. In
California, if anywhere in the world, the next Alexandria is to be
builded. Many strong men are holding to this hope, with steady and
splendid idealisation.

But there is black activity there, too. Always where the white becomes
lustrous the black deepens. On the desk before me on that same winter
day, was a communication from San Francisco--the last to me of several
documents from a newly-formed society for applying psychology. The
documents were very carefully done, beautifully typed and composed. They
reckoned with the new dimension which is in the world, which is abo