She was thinking out her half-year's work. A volume of stories, eight or ten in all--such a subject and such a subject; such or such an incident, situation, value; such a man, such a woman. She knew that her work was good, that it was counted very good, counted to her for name and fame. All that was something to her; rather, it was much to her; but only positively so, not relatively. It could by no means fill her universe. For years she had taken now this, now that filament-like value and with skill and power had enlarged, coloured, and arranged it so that her great audience might also see; and she had done, she thought, service thereby; had, in her place, served beauty and knowledge. But the hunger grew to serve more fully. Knowledge, knowledge--wisdom, wisdom--action....
Hagar moved to a stone seat that commanded an opening in the garden wall. She looked out, down and over a short, steep, dazzling white street and a swarm of low, pale-coloured, chimneyless houses, with the green between of tropic trees, to the surf upon the coral shore and the opaque, marvellous blue of the surrounding sea. The creative passion was upon her, but it moved nowadays as it had moved with many an idealist-realist before.... To mould living material, to deal with the objective, to deal with the living world, not the world of bright-hued shadows; to see the living world lighten to the dawn, see the dull hues brighten, see the beautyless become beauty and beauty grow vivid, to see all the world lift, lift toward the golden day, to see the race become the over-race.... She would have died for that and died to help. She laid her arms along the stone and her head upon them. "And yet I do not help, or not with all that is in me. I sit here to one side and spin fancies."
She rose, and put on a shady hat, and going out into the dazzling white street moved down it, and then by another across for some distance to the white road by the sea. Her back to the town, she walked on. A few scattered palms, the sea-wall; then where it ended, an edging tangle of the hard green leaves of the sea-grape; outside of that, low fantastically worn coral rock and the white dash and spray of the water. Though the sun was high and the sky intense and cloudless, a wind blew always; the air was dry and the day not too warm. There was hardly anyone upon the road. She met a cluster of negro children and talked with them a little. A surrey, of the type that waited on the street near the great hotels, passed her, driven sleepily by a sleepy negro, within it a large man in white. When it was gone in a little cloud of white dust there was only the long road, and the unyielding monotonous green of the sea-grape, and the water thundering in an undertone. Hagar turned aside, broke through the grape, and came down to the edge of the surf. There was a rock hollowed until it made a rude chair. She sat down and looked out to sea. On one hand, across the harbour mouth, rose from a finger-narrow sliver of land, a squat white lighthouse; but turn a little and look away and there was only the open sea, unimaginably blue, azure as the sky. The soft wind blew, the surf broke in low thunder. Hagar, her chin upon her hand, sat for a long time, very still.