"And now?"
"And now, on the human plane, it seems to me that we may be immediately above that region." She took a pointed piece of driftwood and drew upon the sand. "Here is the human plane—and here above it is another plane." She drew a diagonal line between. "And that is a stairway of growth from one to the other. And we are turning from this plane—the lower plane—and coming upon that stairway, and down it, to meet us, pours like a morning wind, like the first light in the sky, a hint of what may be. Like that ancestral tribe, we are growing, we are changing—we feel a strange new life within us—we are passing out, we are coming in—we need a new word."
"What would it be?"
"I do not know.... After a while, an age hence maybe, when the light is stronger, we will coin it. Now there is only intuition of the change.... There is something in a translation I was reading of one of the Upanishads, 'But he who discerns all creatures in his Self and his Self in all creatures, has no disquiet.... What delusion, what grief can be with him in whom all creatures have become the very self of the thinker, discerning their oneness?... He has spread around a thing, bright, bodiless, taking no hurt, sinewless, pure, unsmitten by evil.... That might come after a long, long time, after change upon change."
The great sea murmured on, a wild white bird flew across the round of vision, melted into the sunset.
"And each change is greater by geometrical progression than was the one before?"
"Not the change itself, but that into which the change leads us. Each time we depart at right angles.... Yes, I think so."
"And the movement of women toward freedom of field and toward self-recognition—no less than the general movement toward socialization—is part of the change?"
"All things are part of it.... Yes, it is part."
She rose from the sand. "The sun is setting." They walked back to the surrey and took the homeward road. As they came over the Blue Hills it was first dusk; the town lay, grey-pearl, before them, and above it swam the moon, full and opaline. "How many days have you now?"