did not try to respond in kind--with her lips at least. She
began teasing the youth about his crinkly hair. Breaking a twig as she
spoke, she threw it carelessly at his hair, and it stuck in the closely
curled locks. She laughed gayly at him. Perhaps in some way rather
subtly than suddenly, as by a ghostly messenger from afar, he may have
been made aware of her beautiful body, of the exquisite lines of her
figure, of the pink of her radiant skin, or the red of her girlish lips.
For the consciousness of these things seemed to spend his soul in joy.

The blazing eyes of Tom Van Dorn, squinting down upon the couple under
the tree, could see the grace that shone from a thousand reactions of
their bodies and faces. He opened his mouth to voice something from the
bitterness of his heart but did not speak. Instead he yawned and cried:
"And so we rot and we rot and we rot."

Now it matters little what the lovers chattered about there under the
elm tree, as they played with sticks and pebbles. It was what they would
have said that counts--or perhaps what they should have said, if they
had been able to voice their sense of the gift which the gods were
bestowing. But they were dumb humans, who threw pebbles at each other's
toes, though in the deep places of their souls, far below the surface
waves of bashful patter, heart might have spoken to heart in passing
thus:

"Oh, Lila, what is beauty? What is it in the soul, running out glad to
meet beauty, whether of line, of tone, of color, of form, of motion, of
harmony?"

And the answer might have been trumpeted back through the deep:

"Maybe beauty is the God that is everywhere and everything, releasing
himself in matter. Perhaps for our eyes and ears and fingers, the
immanent God had an equation, whose answer is locked in our souls that
are also a part of God--created in his image. And when in curve or line,
in sequence of notes or harmony, or in thrilling touch sense, the
equation is stated in terms of radiation, God seeking our soul's answer,
speaks to us."

But none of this trumpet call of souls reached the two fathers who were
watching the lovers. For one man was too old in selfishness to
understand, and the other had grown too old in bearing others' burdens
to know what voices speak through the soul's trumpet, when love first
comes into the heart. So the hammers hammered and the saws groaned in
the pavilion, and a hard heart hammered and a soul groaned and a tongue
babbl