"_Westward the Course of Empire takes its way--!_"

Oh, those pioneers with their faces turned towards the Golden West!
The tired women and the bronzed men! Not one of them without that
eager look of hope, of a dream realized as the land of Promise looms
ahead!

Derry had often talked that picture over with his mother. "It was such
men, Derry, who made our country--men unafraid--North, South, East and
West, it was these who helped to shape the Nation's destiny, as we must
help to shape it for those who come after us."

It was in front of this picture that he was to meet Jean. He had
wanted to share with her the inspiration of it.

She was late, and he waited, leaning on the marble rail which
overlooked the stairway. People were going up and down passing the
picture, but not seeing it, their pulses calm, their blood cold. The
doors of the elevators opened and shut, women came and went in velvet
and fur, laughing. Men followed them, laughing, and the picture was
not for them.

Derry wondered if it were symbolic, this indifference of the crowd.
Was the world's pageant of horrors and of heroism thus unseen by the
eyes of the unthinking?

And now Jean ascended, the top of her hat first--a blur of gray, then
the red of the rose that he had sent her, a wave of her gray muff as
she saw him. He went down to meet her, and stood with her on the
landing. Beneath the painting, on one side, ran the inscription, "No
pent up Utica confines our powers, but the boundless Continent is
ours," on the other side, "The Spirit moves in its allotted space; the
mind is narrow in a narrow sphere."

Thousands of men and women came and went and never read those words.
But boys read them, sitting on the stairs or leaning over the rail--and
their minds were carried on and on. Old men, coming back after years
to read them again, could testify what the words had meant to them in
the field of high endeavor.

Jean had seen the painting many times, but now, standing on the upper
gallery floor with Derry, it took on new meanings. She saw a girl with
hope in her eyes, a young mother with a babe at her breast; homely
middle-aged women redeemed from the commonplace by that long gaze ahead
of them; old women straining towards that sunset glow. She saw,
indeed, the Vision of Brave Women. "If it could only be like that for
me, Derry. Do you see--they go with their husbands, those women, and I
must stay behind."

"You will go with me, be