"I see what you mean. You're more the philosopher than the crusader. Well, we need philosophers, too!... I'm more, I think, the type that is sharpened to a point, that couches its lance for one Promised Land, which it believes is the key to many another. But I hold that it is better to move full-orbed, if you can."
"I do not know--I do not know," said Hagar. "I try to plunge with my whole mind into some political or social theory, but I fail. Even the slow drawing-up of the submerged capacities in woman, even the helping in that,--which is greater than would be the discovery of Atlantis, which is greater than almost anything else,--cannot bring the ends together. Name everything and there is so much besides!"
"There is such a thing," said Denny, "as going to the stake for what you know to be partial, only factors, scaffoldings, stairs to mount by.... Stairs and scaffoldings are necessary; therefore, die for them if need be."
The surrey had left the sight of the sea. The pale road stretched straight before them, going on until it touched the cobalt sky. On either hand stood growing walls, dense and thorny as those about the Sleeping Beauty's palace--all manner of trees, silver palm and thatch palm, tamarind, poison-wood and plum, ink-berry and jack-bush, bound all together with smilax and many another vine. At long intervals occurred an opening, a ragged space and a hut or cabin, with an odour, too languid-sweet, of orange blossoms, and a vision of black children. The walls closed in again sombrely. The road would have been a little dreary but for the sky and the sun and the jewel-fine air.
"I suppose," said Hagar, "that there is a certain Brahmin-like attitude to be overcome. I suppose that to take wallet and staff and go with the mass upon the day's march, encouraging, lifting, helping, pointing forward, bearing with the others, is a nobler thing than to run ahead upon your own path and cry back to the throng, 'Why are you not here as well?' I suppose that ... and yet there are times when I am Nietzschean, too. I can be opposites."
"Yes; that is what bewilders," said Denny. "To include contradictories and irreconcilables--to be both centripetal and centrifugal--to be in one brain Socialist and Individualist!... But the greatest among mankind have found themselves able. They have been farthest ahead, and yet they have always seemed to be in the midst."