Barry’s brows knit with anxiety. “It is so taken up with its star part on the Asian stage that it is forgetting distressing little facts like the city’s drainage system. A city with bad water and worse drainage trying to lead the East!” He smiled dourly. “What is all our cleaning and scouring to accomplish if we can not get it out of the Oriental consciousness that their vile plagues are the will of God—Isabel’s Green God of fate!” He drew a long breath. “But we will triumph, if only we’re allowed the time—if only we’re not halted in the thick of the dust.”
“I insist,” Father Hull put in, “that the introduction of baseball into the Islands has been Barry’s greatest stroke. Though he come to wear the crown of Asia, it shall not compare to the glory of revolutionizing the native with clean universal sport. A new national passion that is neither bloody nor bestial, and in which all the tribes can unite.”
“It’s the schools that are getting them,” Barry declared. “Why, the children do compound fractions for you before your face, sing the grandest songs about liberty, and feed you ice-cream that they made themselves in a freezer in the backyard. In the Straits Settlement, when I looked for schools, they showed me usually an empty hut with a dirt floor, in which there was no sign of pupils or teachers. That’s the lot of the tribute-paying East. Do you wonder these people think a wonder has appeared in Asia?”
“It appears to me,” Mrs. Ashby said thoughtfully, “that there is just one thing that you have not sufficiently taken into account in your plans for the Millennium, Barry—and that is human nature. Only when the individual, each individual comes into a complete realization of his highest estate, can the ultimate peace and happiness of the world be secured. So few of us are conscious of our own mysterious possibilities.” Her glance dwelt upon Julie. “For example,” she said, “can Miss Dreschell interpret for us the unusual intimation in her own face? There is something there of which she may be quite unconscious, yet it is very significant.”
Barry regarded Julie thoughtfully. “I noticed it—a year ago,” he said gravely, “but I find it indefinable. It seems to be something that one merely feels.”
Mrs. Ashby asked Julie if others had remarked this quality, and Julie reluctantly admitted that others had. Isabel, for example, who had called it spring magic, and the angel in the pillar of fire, and other utterly unintelligible bits of Eastern imagery. Nobody had ever said though, she reflected ruefully, that it would in any way make her great.
“To me it appears,” Mrs. Ashby said, “to be the reflection—or the promise of great power.”
Julie glancing up found Barry’s eyes blazing upon her. His face wore the look it had worn that night on the roof when he had told her about finding his city. For a moment there seemed to be nobody but the two of them in the room, which had suddenly taken on magic dimensions and become the medium of a whole new existence.
The voices around her brought her back to her surroundings. She became aware of Chad’s observation fastened deeply upon her. When his acute examination lifted, she overheard him say in an undertone to Mrs. Ashby: “This quality you see in the young lady’s face, isn’t it merely the transient magic of youth and sex? Aren’t we, particularly men, inclined to be dazzled by the mysteries we read into a woman’s form or face? She herself says she has failed in all her enterprises. What is that a promise of?”
“It is neither youth nor sex, but something that is as far removed from them as the stars,” Mrs. Ashby replied.