t
in their way if you try to interfere. It's not your job. For the few
people capable of it, there is nothing more necessary to do for the
world than to show how splendid and orderly and harmonious a thing
life can be. While the blunt chisels hack out the redemption of the
overworked (and Heaven knows I don't deny their existence), let those
who can, preserve the almost-lost art of living, so that when the
millennium comes (you see I don't deny that this time it's on the
way!) it won't find humanity solely made up of newly freed serfs who
don't know what use to make of their liberty. How is beauty to be
preserved by those who know and love and serve her, and how can they
guard beauty if they insist on going down to help clean out the
sewers? Miss Marshall, don't you see how I am right? Don't you see how
no one can do more for the common weal than just to live, as finely,
as beautifully, as intelligently as possible? And people who are
capable of this noblest service to the world only waste themselves and
serve nobody if they try to do the work of dray-horses."

Sylvia had found this wonderfully eloquent and convincing. She now
broke in. "When I was a young girl in college, I used to have a
pretentious, jejune sort of idea that what I wanted out of life was to
find Athens and live in it--and your idea sounds like that. The best
Athens, you know, not sensuous and selfish, but full of lovely and
leisurely sensations and fine thoughts and great emotions."

"It wasn't pretentious and jejune at all!" said Morrison warmly, "but
simply the most perfect metaphor of what must have been--of course,
I can see it from here--the instinctive sane effort of a nature like
yours. Let's all try to live in Athens so that there will be some one
there to welcome in humanity."

Page volunteered his first contribution to the talk. "Oh, I wouldn't
mind a bit if I thought we were really doing what Morrison thinks is
our excuse for living, creating fine and beautiful lives and keeping
alive the tradition of beauty and fineness. But our lives aren't
beautiful, they're only easeful. They're not fine, they're only
well-upholstered. You've got to have fitly squared and substantial
foundations before you can build enduring beauty. And all this," he
waved his hand around him at the resplendent, modern city, "this isn't
Athens; it's--it's Corinth, if you want to go on being classic.
As near as I can make out from what Sylvia lets fall, the nearest
a