“These buildings cannot be shaken or blown down like paper; and something more than a race of columbines must come to be born in them.”
Julie peered up into his face. “I never saw anybody so filled with a thing as you are with all this. I don’t believe you have a soul separate from it.”
He smiled. “I wonder!” he said. “Well, I’m fearfully busy, and happy as a lark. Oh, but I don’t want them to shut down on all this!
“It’s a nuisance to be finite,” he declared; “one can’t be in two or three places at once. I can’t leave here now, yet we’ve got to keep the wheels of the Asiatic car of civilization on the tracks. Now that the Assembly has cut loose, I’m holding my breath. It’s a grand time to be alive!” Barry declared, relapsing, as he occasionally did, into Irish idiom. “Now, when the whole world is constructive. Once when I was in Dublin, off my ship, an old woman looked in my palm and said, ‘It’s a great destruction that’s coming!’
“‘To me?’ I asked.
“‘To the whole earth,’ she said.
“‘But I didn’t ask for the telling of the whole world’s fortune,’ I said.
“‘It’s your fortune, and everyman’s,’ she answered. ‘But after it’s blown off the globe, a glorious time will be coming.’
“‘And what am I to be doing with myself until then?’ I demanded.
“‘Travel Eastward!’ she said.”