ant?"

"Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back
to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone
good taste again."

"Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want
the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the
women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and
even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the
classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a
more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're
tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired
of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the
husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a
Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it;
trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said
that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it.
All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every
longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want
everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----"

She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in:

"See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot
of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically,
and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them
than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to
believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men
rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and
hideous player-pianos and----"

At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of
being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing
the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this
second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling
his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl
at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an
individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders
off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?"

At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances
his timidity was as depressing to h