thin, clear moonbeams.

"'But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is
only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves
for is always granted. The event is the print of your form. It fits you
like your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events are the children
of his mind and body.'"

Algitha leant forward. The members of the Preposterous Society settled
into attitudes of attention.

Hadria said that this was a question that could not fail to be of
peculiar interest to them all, who had their lives before them, to make
or mar. It was an extremely difficult question, for it admitted of no
experiment. One could never go back in life and try another plan. One
could never make sure, by such a test, how much circumstance and how
much innate ideas had to do with one's disposition. Emerson insisted
that man makes his circumstance, and history seemed to support that
theory. How untoward had been, in appearance, the surroundings of those
who had made all the great movements and done all the great deeds of the
world. Let one consider the poverty, persecution, the incessant
discouragement, and often the tragic end of our greatest benefactors.
Christ was but one of the host of the crucified. In spite of the theory
which the lecturer had undertaken to champion, she believed that it was
generally those people who had difficult lives who did the beneficent
deeds, and generally those people who were encouraged and comfortable
who went to sleep, or actively dragged down what the thinkers and actors
had piled up. In great things and in small, such was the order of life.

"Hear, hear," cried Ernest, "my particular thunder!"

"Wait a minute," said the lecturer. "I am going to annihilate you with
your particular thunder." She paused for a moment, and her eyes rested
on the strange white landscape beyond the little group of faces upturned
towards her.

"Roughly, we may say that people are divided into two orders: first, the
organizers, the able, those who build, who create cohesion, symmetry,
reason, economy; and, secondly, the destroyers, those who come wandering
idly by, and unfasten, undo, relax, disintegrate all that has been
effected by the force and vigilance of their betters. This distinction
is carried into even the most trivial things of life. Yet without that
organization and coherence, the existence of the destroyers themselves
would become a chaos and a misery."

The oak