"What?" she interjected. "Have you any idea of what I've given you?"
"You've given me," I repeated, "the great, big affection to live in, but with something in it that poisoned the air. I'm grateful to you, Vio, more grateful than I can begin to tell you, especially as I know now what you've been thinking all the time; but you can easily understand that I prefer not to live in an atmosphere laden with—"
"If we purified that, the atmosphere? What then?"
"It still wouldn't be everything. When I say I don't like the life, it isn't just because it's cast me out; it's because for me—mind you, I'm not speaking of any one else—it's become vapid and—and foolish, and—and a throwing away of time."
"And what do you find among the people you—you call your friends that's more worth while?"
"That's what it's hard to tell you. I find the simple and elemental, something basic and fundamental that the new crisis in existence is telling us to discover and—and rectify. You remember what I said a month or more ago to Stroud, that our building was collapsing?"
"Yes; and I hoped you were, as people say, talking through your hat."
"Well, I wasn't. The building is coming down, right to the foundations. Only the foundations will remain."
"They're awfully crude foundations, aren't they?"
"Exactly. That's just where the trouble is. The bases of our life are ugly and unclean, and so we've turned away and refused to look at them. I'm going back, Vio, to see what I can do to make them less ugly, less unclean, and more secure to build on. How can we erect a society on foundations that already have the element of decay in them before we've added the first layer of our superstructure?"