'Yet I believe in all the beauty one can vitalize. It is essentially wholesome. It does not lend itself to morbid demands. The collector's passion looks like greed, and doubtless for a time it is greed. But, sooner or later, Too-Much sickens them. Their adorable possessions teach them there is profanation in having more wonderful things than they can enter into personal relation with. Therefore the inevitable end of all overgrown collections is the museum or the auction-room. I have seen it too often not to know it is true!--If you want a perfect illustration of this in literature read Mrs. Wharton's _The Daunt Diana_. It cuts down like a knife to the essential fact that our relations with beauty must be limited enough to have the personal quality. And--don't you see?--this automatic destruction of greed that beauty finally teaches to the collector, is the same automatic destruction of it that I dare think intensive living in our homes might bring to all greed. It is a proof of the theory on another plane.'
'I think one might own a Mountly House without greed,' persisted Grace wistfully. 'Having no house at all, I naturally refuse to think of myself as ending my days in any less perfect domicile. What do you mean by the "ultimate purpose" of our houses?'
'Ah! that,' said Honoria, with a quick indrawing of her breath, 'is the very core of all my thought, and I don't know how to make you see it!'
She rose abruptly and walked to the end of the veranda. She stood there a while, looking across at the spreading gables of her own brown bungalow, with the yearning on her face that only house-mothers know. Yonder was her home. Set on a mighty shoulder of the earth, facing the sunset and the sea, it clung to the soil as the brown rocks cling. Behind it were the mighty Sierras with their crests of snow; before it, the sweetest land God ever smiled upon; within it, all the treasures of her eyes, her mind, her heart. Just as it stood there in the February sun, it was an abode compact of love, of aspiration, of desire. The ancient love of man for his shelter had gone into it, and the love of woman for the place of her appointed suffering. Desire for beauty and hope of peace were in its making. Its walls had heard the birth-cries; her children had played about its doors; out from it had been borne her dead. Inconsiderable speck on the vast hill-shoulder that it was, it could defy time and the elements, even as she defied them, for she had given it of her own immortality.
