"Do you remember him?" cried Diana. "He'll be so delighted! He took you down Bright Angel years ago."
"Of course I remember him. Give him my regards when you write to him.
And go on with your story."
"My mother was a California woman, a very good geologist. My nurse was a Navajo woman. Somehow, by the time I was into my teens, I was conscious of the great loss to the world in the disappearance of the spiritual side of Indian life. I knew the Canyon well by then and I knew the Indians well and the beauty of their ceremonies was even then more or less merged in my mind with the beauty of the Canyon. Their mysticism was the Canyon's mysticism. I tried to write it and I couldn't, and I tried to paint it, and I couldn't. And then one day my mother said to me, 'Diana, nobody can interpret Indian or Canyon philosophy. Take your camera and let the naked truth tell the story!'"
Diana paused. "I'm not clever at talking. I'm afraid I've given you no real idea of my purpose."
"One gets your purpose very clearly, when one recalls your Death and the Navajo, for instance, eh, Huntingdon?"
"Yes, Mr. President!"
"I suppose the two leading Indian ethnologists are Arkwind and Sherman, of the Smithsonian, are they not, Miss Allen?" asked the President.
"Oh, without doubt! And they have been very kind to me."
The President nodded. "They both tell me that your work is of extraordinary value. They tell me that you have actually photographed ceremonies so secret, so mystical, that they themselves had only heard vaguely of their existence. And not only, they say, have you photographed them, but you have produced works of art, pictures 'pregnant with celestial fire.'"
Diana's cheeks were a deep crimson. "Oh, I deserve so little credit, after all!" she exclaimed. "I was born in the midst of these things. And the Indians love me for my old nurse's sake! But human nature is weak and what you tell me makes me very happy, sir."