But after all they did not go to BogotÁ. That autumn a revolution flared up in Colombia. Medway considered the matter, but finally shrugged and shook his head. His point gained and BogotÁ prepared for, he gave the idea up "for this time" with entire nonchalance. But they were in New York by now, and something must be done. He went with Hagar to Gilead Balm for two weeks—going home for the second time in eight years. The first time had been perhaps two years after his accident. Old Miss had cried out so to him to come, had so passionately besought him to let her see him again, and Hagar had so steadfastly supported her claim, that at last he gave in and went. He spent two months at Gilead Balm, and he had been gracious and considerate to all the family with an extra touch for his mother. But when he went away he evidently considered that he had done all that mortal could ask, and though Old Miss continued to write to him every three months, and though she always said, "And when are you coming home?" she never so urged the matter again.

Now he went with Hagar down through the late autumn country to his birthplace, and stayed for a fortnight, as unruffled, debonair, and dominant as before. The Colonel and Old Miss had each of them years enough now; as age is counted they were old. But each came of a long-lived stock, and they held their own to a marvel. Hagar could see the difference the years had made, but there was no overwhelming difference. The Colonel did not ride so far, and Old Miss, though she jealously guarded her key-basket and abated authority not a jot, was less active than of old. She had grown rather deaf, and Medway avoided much conversation with her. Captain Bob was more broken; he looked older than the elder brother. Luna was dead long ago, and he had another hound, Lisa. He was fond of Lisa and Lisa of him, but Lisa was not Luna, and he was very faithful to Luna's memory and always telling stories of her intelligence and exploits. Miss Serena had changed very little. Mrs. Green was dead, and the overseer's house at the moment stood empty. Car'line was dead, too, but Mary Magazine kept house for Isham. Hagar walked down to the ferry, and she and Mary Magazine talked about the old flower dolls and the hayloft, and the cavern by the spring. She walked by herself upon the ridge, and sat under the cucumber tree, and went to the north side, and, leaning against the beech, which had grown to be a good-sized tree, looked down the long slope to the hollow and streamlet, the sunken boulder and thicket.

The two weeks passed. Indian summer held throughout November. "This dreamy place makes you disinclined to vigorous planning," said Medway. "I think, Gipsy, that we will drift on down through Florida, and cross to Cuba."

This year there were evidently cross-winds. At Palm Beach, Medway came upon an old acquaintance, associate of ancient days in Paris, an artist with whom he had rambled through Fontainebleau forest and drunk good wine in Barbizon. For years each had been to the other a thin memory; now, almost with violence, the attraction renewed itself. But the artist was not going to Cuba; he was going to the Bahamas. He had a commission to paint a portrait, and his subject, who was a Chicago multi-millionaire, had elected to winter at Nassau and to give the sittings there. Commissions evidently did not come every day to the artist, who was post-post-impressionist, and he was quite willing to go to Nassau, jubilantly so, in fact. He said that, for once, light was going to be thrown upon the multi-millionaire.

Medway strove to persuade him to forfeit the commission and go to Cuba; and he was even, it was evident, prepared to make the proceeding no financial loss. But the artist stated explicitly that he had a sense of honour and could not leave the Chicagoan in the lurch; besides he wanted to paint that portrait. "Come and see me do it, old fellow! I'm going to take a reasonable small house with a garden, knock out partitions and make a studio. One commission leads to another:—Light on the whole bunch.—Oh, I'm told that you've got a million, too! How the devil did you get into that galley?" In the end, rather than part with the old companion, Medway exchanged Cuba for the Bahamas.

Thomson found a house that he thought would answer. Hagar went with him to see it, and agreed that it would. Both spoke entirely with reference to Medway. Back at the great hotel, she explained its advantages. "There's a pleasing, tangled garden, palms and orange trees and hibiscus, and a high garden wall. The verandahs, upper and lower, are wide. You get the air, and you have, besides the town, a great sweep of this turquoise sea. There's only a short, quiet, easy street between the house and Mr. Greer's studio. I think that it will answer."

It answered very well as Medway granted. He and Greer were much together. The Chicagoan, when he arrived, proved to be a good fellow, too, earnest in his endeavour to play blotting-paper to culture. Greer gathered from the hotel several congenial Americans. Medway, who always had the best of letters, provided an Englishman or two from the more or less stationary Government set. The studio became practically his and Greer's in common; they were extraordinarily good talkers and they rolled wonderful cigarettes and Mahomet made cafÉ fort. A violinist of some note was stopping at the hotel, and he and his violin added themselves to the company. When a traveller who knew Lhasa, Bangkok, and Baalbek, Knossos and Kairwan and Kandy, was joined to the others, it became evident that Medway had made his circle and found the winter's entertainment.

He had never made greatly too large demand upon Hagar's hours. He was full of resources, supple in turning from person to person of all his varied acquaintance in varied lands, moderately appreciative, too, of the value of solitude. On her side she would have stood, had there been need, for time to herself. It was to her the very breath of life. But there was never extreme need. She was within call when he wanted to turn to her, and that was sufficient. But this winter, it was evident, she would have her days to a greater extent than usual in her own hand. There was never any accounting to him for her days apart from him; almost from the first there had obtained that relation of personal liberty. To do him justice he felt no desire to exact such an accounting, and had he tried to do so he would have failed.

Hagar saw that she was going to have time, time this winter; and, what she liked, they would be long enough in one place to allow her to work with advantage. There would be visitors, invitations—already they had begun:—Medway would wish to give, now and then, a garden-party, a dinner-party. But life would by no means run to an exchange of visits and entertainments. Father and daughter had alike, in this direction, the art of sufficient but not too much. Anything beyond a certain, not-great amount wearied and exasperated him, wearied and saddened her. All that would be kept in bounds. Hagar, pacing the garden, saw quiet days, surcharged with light.

She was thinking out her half-year's work. A volume of stories, eight or ten in all—such a subject and such a subject; such or such an incident, situation, value; such a man, such a woman. She knew that her work was good, that it was counted very good, counted to her for name and fame. All that was something to her; rather, it was much to her; but only positively so, not relatively. It could by no means fill her universe. For years she had taken now this, now that filament-like value and with skill and power had enlarged, coloured, and arranged it so that her great audience might also see; and she had done, she thought, service thereby; had, in her place, served beauty and knowledge. But the hunger grew to serve more fully. Knowledge, knowledge—wisdom, wisdom—action....

Hagar moved to a stone seat that commanded an opening in the garden wall. She looked out, down and over a short, steep, dazzling white street and a swarm of low, pale-coloured, chimneyless houses, with the green between of tropic trees, to the surf upon the coral shore and the opaque, marvellous blue of the surrounding sea. The creative passion was upon her, but it moved nowadays as it had moved with many an idealist-realist before.... To mould living material, to deal with the objective, to deal with the living world, not the world of bright-hued shadows; to see the living world lighten to the dawn, see the dull hues brighten, see the beautyless become beauty and beauty grow vivid, to see all the world lift, lift toward the golden day, to see the race become the over-race.... She would have died for that and died to help. She laid her arms along the stone and her head upon them. "And yet I do not help, or not with all that is in me. I sit here to one side and spin fancies."

She rose, and put on a shady hat, and going out into the dazzling white street moved down it, and then by another across for some distance to the white road by the sea. Her back to the town, she walked on. A few scattered palms, the sea-wall; then where it ended, an edging tangle of the hard green leaves of the sea-grape; outside of that, low fantastically worn coral rock and the white dash and spray of the water. Though the sun was high and the sky intense and cloudless, a wind blew always; the air was dry and the day not too warm. There was hardly anyone upon the road. She met a cluster of negro children and talked with them a little. A surrey, of the type that waited on the street near the great hotels, passed her, driven sleepily by a sleepy negro, within it a large man in white. When it was gone in a little cloud of white dust there was only the long road, and the unyielding monotonous green of the sea-grape, and the water thundering in an undertone. Hagar turned aside, broke through the grape, and came down to the edge of the surf. There was a rock hollowed until it made a rude chair. She sat down and looked out to sea. On one hand, across the harbour mouth, rose from a finger-narrow sliver of land, a squat white lighthouse; but turn a little and look away and there was only the open sea, unimaginably blue, azure as the sky. The soft wind blew, the surf broke in low thunder. Hagar, her chin upon her hand, sat for a long time, very still.

"How good is man's life, the mere living—"

It seemed true enough, sitting there in the sunshine, in the heart of so rich a beauty. She agreed. How good it was, how good it often was!—only, only.... The line was true, perhaps, of all at some time, of some at all times—though she doubted that—but never of all at all times. It was true of a host at very few times; it was never so true of any as it might be.

"How good is man's life, the mere living!—how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"

Who felt that?—Not even the poets immemorial who so sang—sang often in sadness of heart! They felt only the promise that the future cast before her.

Association of ideas was so strong and quick within her that she was apt to call up images, not singly, but in series and sequences. Her mind swept away from the West Indian sea. She saw her mother at Gilead Balm, beating her wings against invisible bars; the woman on the packet-boat, racked with anxiety, her child in her arms, begging her way to her sick mate; the figure of the convict at the lock, Thomasine in the silk mill, Omega Street.... She thought of Rachel and her married life, of things which she had heard at the Settlement, and the pain in Elizabeth Eden's eyes as she told them. She thought of Eglantine and its insidious sapping, sapping ... of Miss Serena and her stunted, small industries and too-obedient soul. She thought of Miss Bedford, and of Francie Smythe, and of Mrs. LeGrand. She seemed again to hear Mrs. LeGrand upon Roger Michael. She thought of the Bishop and the day he passed sentence upon a child for reading a great book. She saw the thicket back of the ridge, and dogs set by a human being upon a human being. She saw winter streets in New York, and the light shining on the three balls of the pawnbrokers, and a bread-line, and men and women huddled on park benches while the wind shook the leafless trees. She saw Wall Street and St. Timothy's. Her mind passed overseas. Russia—three summers before they had been there. Medway, though he laughed at her, had agreed to a stepping aside which she proposed. She wished to see Tolstoy. It was always easy to him to arrange such things, and it had ended in their being invited for two days to YÁsnaya PolyÁna. She saw again the old man and heard his slow words. Non-resistance—but his mind, through his pen, was not non-resistant! It acted, it scourged, it fought, it strove to build and to clear the ground that it might build. He deceived himself, the tremendous old man. He thought himself quietist as Lao-Tzu, but there in that bare, small study he cried, Allah! Allah! and fought like a Mohammedan. Russia and the burden of Russia ... the world and the burden of the world. She thought of the East, and now her mind entered Zenanas—of India, and it was the child marriages; of Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and it was the veiled women, proclaimed without souls. She saw the eunuchs at the gate. Away to Europe—and she saw that concept grading away, but never quite gone, never quite gone. Woman as mind undying, self-authoritative and unrelated, the arbiter of her own destiny, the definer of her own powers, with an equal goal and right-of-way—few were the earthly places where that ray fell!

"How good is man's life, the mere living—"

"With vast modifications and withdrawals, with dross and alloy," said Hagar. "But it might be—O, God, it might be! Lift all desire and you lift the whole. Lift the present—steady, steady!—and know that one day the future will blossom. And a woman's work is now with women. Solidarity—unification—woman at last for woman."