healthy citizen. It
was nothing less than sheer folly as well as inhuman cruelty to let the
children sleep in crowded, hot rooms, reeking with diseases, and run wild
throughout the long summer, learning vice in the city streets. And we
still had slavery--economic slavery--yes, and the more horrible slavery
of women and young girls in vice--as much a concern of government as the
problem which had confronted it in 1861 . . . . We were learning that
there was something infinitely more sacred than property . . . .

And now Alison recalled, only to be thrilled again by an electric
sensation she had never before experienced with such intensity, the look
of inspiration on the preacher's face as he closed. The very mists of
the future seemed to break before his importuning gaze, and his eyes
seemed indeed to behold, against the whitening dawn of the spiritual age
he predicted, the slender spires of a new Church sprung from the
foundations of the old. A Church, truly catholic, tolerant, whose
portals were wide in welcome to all mankind. The creative impulse,
he had declared, was invariably religious, the highest art but the
expression of the mute yearnings of a people, of a race. Thus had once
arisen, all over Europe, those wonderful cathedrals which still cast
their spell upon the world, and art to-day would respond--was responding
--to the unutterable cravings of mankind, would strive once more to
express in stone and glass and pigment what nations felt. Generation
after generation would labour with unflagging zeal until the art
sculptured fragment of the new Cathedral--the new Cathedral of Democracy
--pointed upward toward the blue vault of heaven. Such was his vision
--God the Spirit, through man reborn, carrying out his great Design . . .

CHAPTER XXII

"WHICH SAY TO THE SEERS, SEE NOT"

I

As Alison arose from her knees and made her way out of the pew, it was
the expression on Charlotte Plimpton's face which brought her back once
more to a sense of her surroundings; struck her, indeed, like a physical
blow. The expression was a scandalized one. Mrs. Plimpton had moved
towards her, as if to speak, but Alison hurried past, her exaltation
suddenly shattered, replaced by a rising tide of resentment, of angry
amazement against a materialism so solid as to remain unshaken by the
words which had so uplifted her. Eddies were forming in the aisle as
the people streamed slowly out of the church, and snatches of their