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Founder, they could find no real cause for self-reproach. Throughout, in every decision, they had respected the idea of limit , which seemed to them in retrospect the very definition of his thought. Agreeing, in principle, that the machine was to be distrusted, they had nevertheless voted to use in their experiment the bicycle, the carpet-sweeper, and the sewing-machine, any machine, in fact, to which a man contributed his own proportionate share of exertion and which tired him like the plough or the hoe. The bath, the flush toilet, all forms of plumbing they tolerated, but they opposed, at least for the time being, the installation of an electric power-plant, proposingto cook by wood and read in the evenings by oil, and to avail themselves of an old icehouse they had found on the property they were buying to solve the very stubborn problem of refrigeration. To their traveling by automobile, Monteverdi could have raised no objection (the trip had to be made somehow), and accused of inconsistency by their enemies, they could argue that they looked upon the family car as Lenin in 1917 looked upon the sealed car offered him by the German State to reach insurrectionary Petersburg—as a vehicle to the future appropriated from the past, the negation of a negation.
    Everything could be explained—the whisky, the contraceptives, the collection of summer fashions being imported by a lady purist—for it was a by-law of this unique Utopia that every member be allowed to bring whatever was necessary to his happiness: he defined himself freely by his choices and could not allege social conformity as an excuse for his personal passions. And out of those loaded automobiles began to come a variety of definitions of happiness: happiness as ornament, happiness as utility, happiness as oblivion, happiness as squalor, happiness in a small suitcase, happiness in giving (Joe Lockman’s Cadillac carried presents for every family), in a French casserole or a sterilizer, a kiddie-coop or a gold evening dress, Spanish shawls, books, pictures, batik hangings, porch furniture, blue jeans, garden tools, carpentry sets, a single tennis racket forever to go unpartnered, a Greek dictionary, Homer and Plato, Elizabethansongs; happiness even arrived, somewhat later, in a moving van carrying two grand pianos and a Chinese Chippendale sideboard.
    To Susan Hapgood, a young novelist, walking on the central lawn with Will Taub, her literary adviser, the scene of the unpacking had all the charms of fiction. Loving only books and conversation, she had already disposed of her small effects in the quarter-cottage allotted to her, and was taking her second pleasure in the expansive company of Taub, who strolled up and down, hands behind his back, surveying the effects of his colleagues with undisguised wonder. A transparent air of proprietorship emanated from his whole person; to his fellow-colonists he suggested a summer hotel manager, with his large city feet clad in new white shoes which creaked even on the grass and betrayed his every movement, a hotel manager, however, in whom curiosity had mastered discretion and who, like an ingenuous bell-boy, could not refrain from comment on the objects, so foreign to his experience, so peculiar in shape and mysterious in utility, on which other persons had obviously placed value. Susan, running along beside him, was experiencing emotions of a different order. Her blue eyes widened and her small mouth emitted sharp cries of literary admiration as each article, when unpacked, added an inspired touch to the characterization of its owner, as though all these domestic details had been endowed with the faculty of surprising convincingly by an Author supremely clever. Who would have thought thatthe Latinist possessed a pair of boxing gloves? Or that Macdermott was inseparable from a snoreball? (Susan was a generous critic.)
    “Why, it’s just like going to a fire,” she exclaimed in her plain, small-town voice, whose