March looked at the low-browed crag overhanging the green slope and
nodded. He was interested in a man who turned so easily from the
technicalities of science to those of art; and asked him if he
admired the new angular artists.

"As I feel it, the Cubists are not Cubist enough," replied the
stranger. "I mean they're not thick enough. By making things
mathematical they make them thin. Take the living lines out of that
landscape, simplify it to a right angle, and you flatten it out to a
mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own beauty; but it is of
just the other sort. They stand for the unalterable things; the
calm, eternal, mathematical sort of truths; what somebody calls the
'white radiance of'--"

He stopped, and before the next word came something had happened
almost too quickly and completely to be realized. From behind the
overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that of a railway train;
and a great motor car appeared. It topped the crest of cliff, black
against the sun, like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in
some wild epic. March automatically put out his hand in one futile
gesture, as if to catch a falling tea-cup in a drawing-room.

For the fraction of a flash it seemed to leave the ledge of rock
like a flying ship; then the very sky seemed to turn over like a
wheel, and it lay a ruin amid the tall grasses below, a line of gray
smoke going up slowly from it into the silent air. A little lower
the figure of a man with gray hair lay tumbled down the steep green
slope, his limbs lying all at random, and his face turned away.

The eccentric fisherman dropped his net and walked swiftly toward