'I have not yet said it all,' she said a little thickly. 'It is hard to say, even to you. I have found an attitude of mind, a path, a way of life I call intensive, for lack of a better name, and I believe in it, not only because it increases my sane satisfaction in living, but also because it finally leads _out_--out of all this tangle of our material lives, into the eternal spaces.
'I see the world of men's business activities chiefly as a place of wrath and greed, and yet even the most grasping must be blindly seeking through their greed an ultimate satisfaction--not more houses or more automobiles, or railroads, or mines, or even power, but something dimly apprehended as beyond all these and more than they--something that is good and that _endures_. For we all want the Enduring Thing. One man sees it here, another there. As for me, I see it in my house. I tell you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone; they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone _is_. Under that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and nourish us.
'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all cravings save the mother's passion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is the heart-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a thousand years! What millenniums have done, shall decades undo? We are not so shallow, so plastic as that! We will go into the mills, the shops, the offices, if we must, but we know we are off the track of life. Neither our desire nor our power is there.
'I have talked glibly enough about restricting superfluous possessions for the sake of developing a finer quality in those we have; I have said only personality gives that quality to our surroundings--but I have not said the final thing. It is this: I believe that in the humble business of loving the material things that are given to us to own and love, in shaping our homes around them, in making them vital and therefore beautiful, so that they serve our spirits in their turn, we are not only making the most of our resources in this life, but are doing more than that. Somehow, I cannot tell you how, I know that we are _getting them across_--into the timeless places! In making them vital we are making them enduring.