"Why yes, beauty isn't only a matter of line and color, is it? There's
the desire for harmony, for true proportions, for grace and suavity,
for nobility of movement. Perhaps the lack of those qualities is felt
in human lives as much as on canvases ... at least perhaps it may be
felt in the future."

"It's an interesting idea," murmured Sylvia, "but I don't quite see
what it means, concretely, as applied to our actual America."

He meditated, looking, as was his habit when walking, up at the trees
above them. "Well, let's see. I think I mean that perhaps our race,
not especially inspired in its instinct for color and external form,
may possibly be fumbling toward an art of living. Why wouldn't it be
an art to keep your life in drawing as well as a mural decoration?" He
broke off to say, laughing, "I bet you the technique would be quite
as difficult to acquire," and went on again, thoughtfully: "In this
modern maze of terrible closeness of inter-relation, to achieve a life
that's happy and useful and causes no undeserved suffering to
the untold numbers of other lives which touch it--isn't there an
undertaking which needs the passion for harmony and proportion? Isn't
there a beauty as a possible ideal of aspiration for a race that
probably never could achieve a Florentine or Japanese beauty of line?"
He cast this out casually, as an idea which had by chance been brought
up to the top by the current of the talk, and showed no indication to
pursue it further when Sylvia only nodded her head. It was one of the
moments when she heard nothing but the brazen clangor of "the wedding
is on the twenty-first," and until the savage constriction around her
heart had relaxed she had not breath to speak. But that passed again,
and the two sauntered onward, in the peaceable silence which was one
of the great new pleasures which Page was able to give her. It now
seemed like a part of the mellow ripeness of the day.

They had come to a bend in the slowly flowing river, where, instead
of torch-bright maples and poplars, rank upon rank of somber pines
marched away to the summit of a steeply ascending foothill. The river
was clouded dark with their melancholy reflections. On their edge,
overhanging the water, stood a single sumac, a standard-bearer with a
thousand little down-drooping flags of crimson.

"Oh," said Sylvia, smitten with admiration. She sat down on a rock
partly because she wanted to admire at her leisure, partly because