"Energy in larger units, affinities gathering strength and flowing together with power!" said Curtin. "Everyone has seen it and felt it in some wise. When it is blamable, unguided, 'mob spirit'! When it is praised, 'esprit de corps, mass heroism, mass enthusiasm, conflagration of genius, voice of the people, unity of spirit,' what not! Most folk have a glimpse of the fact that there is an ocean of desire, emotion, will, as well as rivers and rivulets."

Marget came and sat with them on the steps of the little summer-house in the flower garden. She wore a great check apron, denoting housekeeping and helping Zinia. She sat down beside them. "What have you been doing, Marget?"

"Once a week Zinia and I have a general straightening day. Then my mother and I have been visiting together."

"Truly, truly, Marget?"

"Truly. But in a little wider order, my dear, a little wider order! The order above this order—into which this will melt. Mother and father, and Will and Edgar."

"Two of those are living and two are dead."

Marget smiled. "Ask Wordsworth!"

"I see," said Anna Darcy.

"Very well. Do more than that. Touch!"

With a trail of ivy in her hand she looked past the snapdragon and marigold and larkspur, still blooming, so rich and mild had been this autumn. "Then, as the rooms grew clean, I was with my mother in her birthplace, two hundred miles from here. We were there as adults, moving, loving, understanding with a grown mind, but there in her childhood and girlhood as well, loving to contemplate all the past that was us two! Mine as hers, hers as mine. Mind and feeling ran and caught up with her brothers and sisters, her parents and friends. Her parents remembered their parents and those remembered theirs. Home rose after home, garden after garden, loved place after loved place." Her eyes were upon Drew, whose eyes were upon her. "Do you not see that you can, that you will, recover it all? All that you have been, and you have been very much; all that you are, and you are very much!"

Mimy's singing floated to them from the kitchen:

"And then," said Marget, "I was in Rome with Richard. The sun shone, the wind was in cypress and pine, the fountains made liquid sound. Father Tiber glided, Saint Peter's stood. We went to the Sistine Chapel, and then it was the Capitol within and without, and then the Appian Way and all the Campagna—all Rome—not to-day alone, but all Rome. And then not Rome, but starlight nights from the decks of ships. And then—"

"This was actuality, while your hands swept and dusted the parlor there?"

"My body was in its duty and happy there. Yes. Actuality, but of another order, an order we are coming into. The order of intensified, guided, realized memory and imagination."

"And of reason?"

"And of reason. Profoundly so. It is reason that is guiding. Reason has its higher levels, grows comprehensive, knows longer sequences, completer syntheses. And from the decks of ships we were in the desert watching the stars, shepherds on the hills and shepherds on the plains, shepherds and villagers and wanderers of far days!" She lifted hand and arm in a curious and commanding gesture. "Watching the skies above Queen Rain and King Wind! In desert and plain and upon hills and on seas, thousands and thousands of us strewn in time!"

For an appreciable moment, to some degree, those listening to her became aware of, made, as it were, junction with their own far wandering, far wondering, savage and barbarian self. It was evident that Drew made junction. They touched the mind struggling there, and the lifted gaze. The sense was one of enormous, calm pervasion. They entered into, they aided, their own early man, where he marked the heavens, and around them was the wistfulness of early lands.

Marget spoke on. "Then while I worked we were building pyramids and mountains of the god. We were watching and watching, patterning and naming, comparing, all the skies, the moon, and the planets and the times of the sun, and the white path through the heavens and the great named princes—everywhere, swarthy folk and pale folk! Now we were many and many. Then in us rose the Devoted, the Searchers of the skies, seeking from city roofs and temple roofs knowledge of the Whole for the Whole."

Their interior self opened its wings and used its eyes. As space expanded, so did time. They were there in the October sunshine, on the summer-house steps, but likewise they attended, and in some vast, liberated way they were that collective effort, that process. They might carry the method over into all processes. There swam across the mind other words—"commerce"—"government"—"family"—many and many a word.

Marget's voice went on. "Now one has made a telescope. Our theories change; we stand on dead theories and study on. Thousands of us studying, thousands building knowledge, learning vision! We gaze, we watch, we turn to desks and write and figure, we reason, we divine, we better our instruments, we gather results and make fortunate guesses, we hearken to intuition. We stand on a mossy stone in space and study the Promised Land, the universe that is ours, the ever perpetuating, the ever bettering! Time widens. Here are mountain summits and the observatories of this day, and the clockwork and the pierced dome, and the great eye that we have made, and the photograph. Mind sits at the knee of Great Mind and learns its alphabet. And all the thousands that were and are and will be are one Astronomer, and it is I, still working to know!" She ceased to speak, and sat wrapped in the golden light.

Said Robert Dane: "We follow where you step. You make us follow you."

"I do not make you. You walk with me because you can walk. We walk. It is your Self as it is mine."

"We move and we feel, then, where you are. You live there more fully and keenly than we, but we can breathe and feel and see. Go on! We would have your life, as you have ours."

"Then, after the stars, while I wound the clocks, I walked into the minute. Again thousands of us working and watching, noting, divining—thousands and thousands, years past and to-day and to-morrow! And one devises the microscope. All the laboratories!... Into the cell, into the atom, the infinite dance of relativities and small collections! And the intensed, pointed endeavor, using perception as fine as the millionth part of a hair—we knowing, marking, understanding ourself there, where we are moving clouds! We working there, patient, patient, the god working! The great and the small. We who forever remember and make richer ourself. We the I— And then I was again with my dead, who are just as much and just as little dead as I myself! And then I came out into the garden."

They sat on the summer-house steps, and the marigolds glowed around them. She spoke again. "Here and there, throughout the past, and often now I think in our own day, a man or woman lays hold upon faculties that some day all will lay hold upon. And greater things than these. Forerunners, pioneers! Regard this late flood of books describing communion with the dead and giving detail of the life hereafter. What they describe is the widening consciousness here and now! The increasing awareness. One does not wait for death. Richard and I would not have you think that we are deep, deep, deep in that realm. Were it so nothing could hide it. Were we or any full in the next order you would see the shining. We are not there, but we are in motion toward it, as are many to-day. The road thitherward has its great scenery and long, thrilling adventure! And you, too, all of you, too, are in motion toward it. In this day of ours, each day of the sun, more and more are in motion."

She rose from the step. "I have rested this body that we call Marget Land and now I shall put it again to work in the house we call Sweet Rocket."