“Good God! You don’t purpose staying over here till then?”
The girl looked steadily into the night. “If I did the right thing I’d stay. My little brown men lifted into the citizenship of the world!” she murmured.
“Come down from your perch in the skies. What a dreamer you are—and what a life to fling carelessly away! It belongs to somebody or other.”
“Nobody gives up anything anymore,” Julie went on. “The renunciation that built up the world is going out of it. Upon whose shoulders, if not upon ours, is the foundation of the New World to rest? Isabel called me Atlas, and I have been so happy holding up my little end.”
“It is terrible to speak of spending the years of your life here. You don’t at all know what you are talking about. You don’t know orientals. Wait till you see China, a half dead amœba sprawling over the earth. You will be overwhelmed by the spectacle of humanity getting nowhere at all—just crawling along the surface of the globe, like worms. Some day you will wrest yourself out from these sunken millions in fearful prayer to get back to your own kind. Oh, don’t you feel the darkness, the despair of it? There will never be any renaissance of the East—for to have a renaissance you must have a soul.”
“But we are trying to make the start here—that the fire may travel.”
“Among these inconsequential little swaggerers? Even China, with her art and her senile one-man kind of learning, has them beaten miles. My soul is sick of the whole debased East, I tell you; and I despise this beastly hot-house of an archipelago that spawns existence in such hideous profusion. I am no colonist, no pioneer, ever. I am just a soldier, to restore order and pass on.”
“And you don’t care at all about the great struggle, that is commencing, everywhere over here? Ah, I can feel it,” she cried, “—the powers of Light against the powers of Darkness!”
Calmiden regarded her with profound feeling. “You are terribly young to be here alone.”
“And already I have made two enemies,” she said with a change of mood. “The very first of my life!” she reflected ruefully.