At first they protested. Was this true? They did not understand. Henry asked did I mean making laws to control anarchists? I explained how some had to be forced to conform, even for their own good, and how the others were free, because the law that was good for all, they knew to be best for themselves.
I said: “My own limited personal life is my weapon and means, the only weapon and means I have to come to completeness. I will always remember that it is a means, something to use; but it is my only means, and for that reason it is important and precious to me above all else.”
“You mean,” said Virginia, “that you don’t want to dream away your life, like the ascetics of the middle ages, who dreamed of the whole, but didn’t do their part?”
“Yes,” I said, “exactly. It is as if we were all watching a vast chessboard, all together interested in the game, but each able to control only one pawn, and yet anxious to play in such a way as to win the game along with the others, each for the sake of the whole. And that pawn is our own life; the only power we have.”
“Aren’t we ourselves the pawns?” asked Marian.
“No,” said Henry; “then we couldn’t manage them.”
“We are both pawn and player,” I said; “for if we were only the pawn, in the crowd of little players, we could not see ahead, and would go blindly forward without aim. One must be above the board to see it.”
And now I asked: “Shall we look once more over all we have said in these few months?”
They answered that it seemed to them this last meeting had been a review.
“Yes,” I answered, “aloofness, which a while ago you could not understand, is now wholly clear to you; and more than that, it includes all we have said.”
“It doesn’t include it all,” said Henry, “but it finishes and rounds it out.”
“And our little club is finished,” I asked, “artistically finished?”
“I have noticed that sometimes some of you call it ‘class.’ Is it a class? Is it not rather a club; have we not all gone forward together?”
Ruth answered: “It is each or both. Sometimes we speak of it as class, or club, or lesson.”
“Surely it is a lesson,” said Henry, “because we have learned something from it. Whatever you learn from is a lesson.”
Well, after all, I suppose I have given them my thought; and that is what I must have meant to do.