When everybody in the camp had gathered around the fire, Corona, her eye-glasses illumined by the light of her soul, gazed around the circle and began to speak.
“My dear friends,” she said, “I have been thinking a great deal to-day upon a very important subject, and I have come to the conclusion that we who form this little company have before us one of the grandest opportunities ever afforded a group of human beings. We are here, apart from our ordinary circumstances and avocations, free from all the trammels and demands of society, alone with nature and ourselves. In our ordinary lives, surrounded by our ordinary circumstances, we cannot be truly ourselves; each of us is but part of a whole, and very often an entirely unharmonious part. It is very seldom that we are able to do the things we wish to do in the manner and at times and places when it would best suit our natures. Try as we may to be true to ourselves, it is seldom possible; we are swept away in a current of conventionality. It may be one kind of conventionality for some of us and another kind for others, but we are borne on by it all the same. Sometimes a person like myself or Mr. Archibald clings to some rock or point upon the bank, and for a little while is free from the coercion of circumstances, but this cannot be for long, and we are soon swept with the rest into the ocean of conglomerate commonplace.”
“That’s when we die!” remarked Mrs. Perkenpine, who sat reverently listening.
“No,” said the speaker, “it happens while we are alive. But now,” she continued, “we have a chance, as I said before, to shake ourselves free from our enthralment. For a little while each one of us may assert his or her individuality. We are a varied and representative party; we come from different walks of life; we are men, women, and—” looking at Margery, she was about to say children, but she changed her expression to “young people.” “I think you will all understand what I mean. When we are at our homes we do things because other people want us to do them, and not because we want to do them. A family sits down to a meal, and some of them like what is on the table, some do not; some of them would have preferred to eat an hour before, some of them would prefer to eat an hour later; but they all take their meals at the same time and eat the same things because it is the custom to do so.
“I mention a meal simply as an instance, but the slavery of custom extends into every branch of our lives. We get up, we go to bed, we read, we work, we play, just as other people do these things, and not as we ourselves would do them if we planned our own lives. Now we have a chance, all of us, to be ourselves! Each of us may say, ‘I am myself, one!’ Think of that, my friends, each one! Each of us a unit, responsible only to his or her unity, if I may so express it.”
“Do you mean that I am that?” inquired Mrs. Perkenpine.
“Oh yes,” replied Corona.
“Is Phil Matlack one?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” said the female guide; “if he is one, I don’t mind.”