"We've lived through the revolution, I think," said John Fay. "The senses move more slowly than the event. We're just taking it in, and we call it all to make. But it's really made."
"I see what you mean. But they--but we--have all this monstrous amount of hard work yet--"
"Yes. Introducing the revolution to the slow-minded. But I gather it's being done." He moved about the room, looking at the photographs. "Artists and thinkers and world-builders, men and women.... Those years down there around the Equator, I could at least take the magazines, and I got each twelvemonth a box of books. I know all these people. I used to feel quite intimate with them, down there building bridges.... Building bridges is great work. I believe in it thoroughly and quite enjoy doing it.... And these are bridge-builders, too, and I had a fraternal feeling. I've cut their pictures, men and women, from the magazines and stuck them up in my hut and said good-morning and good-evening to them." He had the pleasantest, humorous eyes, and now they twinkled. "Sometimes I like them so well that I really kow-towed to them. And I've laid a platonic sprig of flowers before more than one of these women's pictures. Perhaps I'd better not tell her so, but there was a picture of Hagar Ashendyne--"
The door opened and Hagar entered. She wore the wood-brown dress of yesterday--she was somewhat pale, with circles under her eyes. "Ah, I am sorry!" she said, "but I could not help it. The strike ... and they send the girls to the Island. Two or three of us went to the court--oh, the snaky, blind thing we call Justice!" Her eyes filled. "Pardon! but if you had been there--" She caught herself up, dashed the moisture from her eyes and said--and looked--that she was glad to see them. "We'll put the things away that make your heart ache! I'll go and change, and we'll eat our dinner and have a pleasant, pleasant time!"
In a very little while she was back, dressed in white, amethysts in an old and curious setting about her throat. They had been Maria's, and to-night she looked like Maria, lines of the haunted mind about her mouth and between her eyes. Only it was not her personal fate that troubled her, but a wider haunting. At dinner, in the café at the corner table, she told them, when they asked her, a little of where she had been and what she had done during the day, told them of this pitiful case and of that. Then after a moment's silence she said resolutely, "Don't let us talk about these things any more. Let us talk about happy things. Talk to me about yourself, Lily!"
