little back, Julia floated;
floated with an unimaginable lightness and yet, somehow, conserved her
aspect of a creature cut in marble.

"I have never seen anything so beautiful in any art, ancient or modern,"
Billy concluded. "When those strange draperies that they affect get wet,
they look like the Elgin marbles."

"If we should take them to civilization," was Pete's answer, "the Elgin
marbles would become a joke."

Billy spoke after a long silence. "It's been an experience that--if I
were--oh, but what's the use? You can't describe it. The words haven't
been invented yet. I don't mean the fact that we've discovered members
of a lost species--the missing link between bird and man. I mean what's
happened since the capture. It's left marks on me. I'll bear them until
I die. If we abandoned this island--and them--and went back to the
world, I could never be the same person. If I woke up and found it was a
dream, I could never be the same person."

"I know," Pete said, "I know. I've changed, too. We all have. Old Frank
is a god. And Honey's grown so that--. Even Ralph's a different man.
Changed--God, I should say I had. It's not only given me a new hold
on things I thought I'd lost-morality, ethics, religion even--but
it's developed something I have no word for--the fourth dimension of
religion, faith."

"It's their weakness, I think, and their dependence." Now it was less
that Billy tried to translate Pete's thought and more that he endeavored
to follow his own. "It puts it up to a man so. And their beauty and
purity and innocence and simplicity--." Billy seemed to be ransacking
his vocabulary for abstract nouns.

"And that sense you have," Pete broke in eagerly, "of molding a virgin
mind. It gives you a feeling of responsibility that's fairly terrifying
at times. But there's something else mixed up with it--the instinct of
the artist. It's as though you were trying to paint a picture on human
flesh. You know that you're going to produce beauty." Pete's face shone
with the look of creative genius. "The production of beauty excuses any
method, to my way of thinking." He spoke half to himself. "God knows,"
he added after a pause, "whatever I've done and been, I could never do
or be again. Sometimes a man knows when he's reached the zenith of his
spiritual development. I've reached mine. I think they're beginning to
trust us," he added after another long interval, in which silently they
contemplated the moving compos