“Yes,” I said, “exactly. It is as if we were all watching a vast chessboard, all together interested in the game, but each able to control only one pawn, and yet anxious to play in such a way as to win the game along with the others, each for the sake of the whole. And that pawn is our own life; the only power we have.”
“Aren’t we ourselves the pawns?” asked Marian.
“No,” said Henry; “then we couldn’t manage them.”
“We are both pawn and player,” I said; “for if we were only the pawn, in the crowd of little players, we could not see ahead, and would go blindly forward without aim. One must be above the board to see it.”
And now I asked: “Shall we look once more over all we have said in these few months?”
They answered that it seemed to them this last meeting had been a review.
“Yes,” I answered, “aloofness, which a while ago you could not understand, is now wholly clear to you; and more than that, it includes all we have said.”
“It doesn’t include it all,” said Henry, “but it finishes and rounds it out.”
“And our little club is finished,” I asked, “artistically finished?”
“Yes,” they said.