David Cairns joined them. "They will be here in a few minutes," he said. "Beth is due, too…. Talking about Bedient?"
"Yes——"
"I was just thinking," Cairns said, "that we were in a way concentrates of New York and the country, and he is talking to all the people through us."
"You are strong, aren't you, David—for him?" the Grey One asked.
"Yes, and I shall be stronger."
"I like that," said Kate Wilkes.
"He'll work through us—and directly," Cairns went on. "I'm glad to wait and serve and build for a man like that. Why, if a thief took his purse, he would only wish to give him a greater thing…. Moreover, he's one of the Voices that will break Woman's silence of the centuries."
"I believe much that he says—all that he says," Kate Wilkes replied, "that Woman is the bread-giver, spiritual and material; that it is she who conserves the ideals and rewards man for fineness and power—when she has a chance. But I also believe that Woman must conquer in herself—the love of luxury, her vanity, her fierce competition for worldly position—if only for the disastrous effect of such evils upon men. They force him to lower his dreams of her, who should be high-priestess."
"He has not missed that," Cairns said, "but there have been multitudes to tell Woman her faults. Bedient restores the dreams of women…. It is Woman who has turned the brute mind of the world from War, and Woman will turn the furious current of the race to-day from the Pits of Trade, where abides the Twentieth Century Lie."
"David, you're steering straight through the Big Deep," Kate Wilkes told him.