Mary’s Reply to Percy – 111

Dear Companions of the Villa,

What am I to say, when my husband has taken my House and given it a thousand new doors? He calls himself doomed to build wings onto my design — but I confess, I rather like the addition. If I am the mason of dreams, he is the carpenter of corridors, and together we may have made not only a house but a whole city.

Percy is right: dreaming must be taught. A spark unattended dies; an imagination unguided may wander into shadows. His School of Many Doors ensures that the House of Dreamers is not a fleeting vision but a place where every generation may enter, again and again, to replenish the fire. I picture children running in and out, carrying tools and books, chasing after mentors; I picture elders returning with wisdom, learning still as they teach.

He flatters me by calling me the school’s first graduate — but if that is so, then I must insist he was my first tutor. It was Percy who first taught me to treat ideas not as idle fancy but as living things, to be tended with care and courage. If he wishes to add his School beside my House, then let him, for it stands not as correction but as completion.

And so I say: let the House of Dreamers glow with imagination, and let the School of Many Doors ensure that glow is never extinguished. Together they form a place where humanity may find its purpose anew, long after the mills have gone silent.

— Mary