"That doesn't seem very clear," she said in answer. "Since I came out
here I've been a sort of riverine missionary, an apostle with no
followers, a reformer with a plan of salvation no one will accept."

"We are not stronger than tradition, than the long custom of ages bred
in the bone and practised by the flesh. You cannot change a people by
firmans; you must educate them. Meanwhile, things go on pretty much the
same. You are a generation before your time. It is a pity, for you have
saddened your youth, and you may never live to see accomplished what you
have toiled for."

"Oh, as to that--as to that . . ." She smoothed back her hair lightly,
and her eyes wandered over the distant hills-mauve and saffron and opal,
and tender with the mist of evening. "What does it matter!" she added.
"There are a hundred ways to live, a hundred things to which one might
devote one's life. And as the years went on we'd realise how every form
of success was offset by something undone in another direction, something
which would have given us joy and memory and content--so it seems. But--
but we can only really work out one dream, and it is the working out--
a little or a great distance--which satisfies. I have no sympathy with
those who, living out their dreams, turn regretfully to another course or
another aim, and wonder-wonder, if a mistake hasn't been made. Nothing
is a mistake which comes of a good aim, of the desire for wrongs righted,
the crooked places made straight. Nothing matters so that the dream was
a good one and the heart approves and the eyes see far."

She spoke as though herself in a dream, her look intent on the glowing
distance, as though unconscious of his presence.

"It's good to have lived among mountains and climbed them when you were