Now, bemused, relaxed, my eyes upon the pale blue Catskills and the summer green, the noise of motorboats like great waterbugs in my ears, I brooded upon the implications of what I was doing and, though I was secretly amused at my own confidence, I realized, too, that what I felt and did and wrote, though doubtless unorthodox to many, was, finally, not really the work of my own inspiration but a logical result of all that was in the world: a statement of the dreams of others which I could formulate only because I shared them. Cave regarded his own words as revelation when, actually, they only echoed the collective mind, a plausible articulation of what most men felt even though their conscious minds were antipathetic, corseted and constricted by stereotyped ways of thinking, the opposite of what they truly believed.
Yet at this step I, for one, hesitated. There was no doubt but that the children and the society would be the better for such an arrangement ... and there was little doubt that our civilization was moving toward such a resolution. But there were parents who would want to retain their children and children who might be better cared for by their progenitors than by even the best-intentioned functionaries of the state. Would the state allow parents to keep their children if they wanted them? If not, it was tyrannous; if so, difficult in the extreme, for how could even the most enlightened board of analysts determine who should be allowed their children and who not? The answer, of course, was in the retraining of future generations. Let them grow up accepting as inevitable and right the surrender of babies to the state. Other cultures had done it and ours could too. But I was able, vividly, to imagine the numerous cruelties which would be perpetrated in the name of the whole, while the opportunity for tyranny in a civilization where all children were at the disposal of a government brought sharply to mind the image of the anthill society which has haunted the imagination of the thoughtful for at least a century.
I had got myself into a most gloomy state by the time Clarissa arrived, trailing across the lawn in an exotic ankle-length gown of gray which floated in yards behind her, like the diaphanous flags of some forgotten army.
“Your lawn is full of moles!” she shouted to me, pausing in her progress and scowling at a patch of turf. “And it needs cutting and more clover. Always more clover, remember that.” She turned her back on me to stare at the river which was as gray as her gown, but, in its soft tidal motion, spangled with light, like sequins on a vast train.
She had no criticism of the river when she at last turned and climbed the steps to the porch; she sat down with a gasp. “I’m boiling! Tea? Hot tea to combat the heat.”
I poured her a cup. “Not a hot day at all.” Actually it was very warm. “If you didn’t get yourself up as a Marie Corelli heroine, you’d be much cooler.”
“Not very gallant, are we today?” Clarissa looked at me over her cup. “I’ve had this gown for five hundred years. There used to be a wimple which went with it but I lost it somewhere.”
“The material seems to be holding up quite well,” and now that she had mentioned it, there was an archaic look to the texture of the gown, like those bits of cloth preserved under glass in museums.
“Silk lasts indefinitely, if one is tidy. I also don’t wear this much, as you can see, but with the devalued state of the dollar (an ominous sign, my dear, the beginning of the end!) I’ve been forced to redo a lot of old odds-and-ends I’ve kept for sentimental reasons. This is one of them and I’m very fond of it.” She spoke this last slowly, to forestall any further ungallantry.
“I just wondered if it was cool.”