“And how did you get to come?”
“I am to teach!” and she stopped, wondering within herself.
“Ah, there are simply no limits to that. Peaceful Penetration, quickening beats in this great life. If we can get these white men and women to stick to their out-posts, we’ll win, in a few years. But to give up life completely, and sit alone in the night among the palms in a desolate bit of jungle with one’s soul roving out over the world and the stars in terrible longing—that is asking blood tribute, as I know only too well!”
“And does it seem to you that it will count?”
“It will count inconceivably in that biggest of struggles—the powers of light against the powers of darkness.”
“But right now?” Julie queried.
“We’re getting the East from this foothold—and the East, as you will come to know, is too big, too monstrous a fact to have against our cosmos. We think the moment has come when, by making clear our ideals here, we can recast her at will.”
“I see,” said the girl slowly, “—and atoms count. Why,” she broke off, “does one feel the shadows so here, quite cold shadows and pitiless? Mrs. Calixter seemed to make me feel that it was all a vast tract of quicksands which finally at some point, would grip one’s feet.”
“A society like this seems to offer no place to a young girl. You,” he mused, “belong to my Neighbor’s Country.”
And thus out of this great big life pattern, this tremendous human arabesque, he thrust her into the limbo of the inconjecturable—out of the work in which he, with his quick vivid face, looking oddly white and visionary in the moonlight, had a star part! Standing there among the shadows of the universe, with the work of men’s souls lifted out of her participation, her heart dropped.