people who have sufficient of the divine
ferment in their heads to be called alive: they are almost always men.
We fly to them as to our own people. We abase ourselves before them in
happy humility. We crave to be allowed to live near them in order that
we may be assured that everything in the world is not nonsense and
machinery--and then, what do we find--?"

She paused, and turned a large fierce eye upon me.

"I do not know," said I, and I endeavoured vainly to look everywhere
but at her eye.

"We find always that they are married," said she, and, saying so, she
lapsed again to a tense and worried reflection.

"You have not told me," I insisted gently, "why you peer earnestly into
space, and thump at intervals upon your knee with the heel of your
fist?"

"These men," said she sternly, "are surrounded by their wives. They
are in gaol and their wives are their warders. You cannot go to them
without a permit. You may not speak to them without a listener. You
may not argue with them for fear of raising an alien and ridiculous
hostility. Scarcely can you even look at them without reproach.--How
then can we live, and how will the torch of life be kept alight?"

"I do not know," I murmured.

She turned her pale eye to me again.

"I am not beautiful," said she.

But there was just a tremor of doubt in her voice, so that the apparent
statement became packed with curiosity, and had all the quality of a
question.

I did not shrug my shoulder nor raise an eyebrow--

"You are very nice," I replied.

"I do not want to be beautiful," she continued severely. "Why should
I? I have no interest in such things. I am interested only in living,
and living is thinking; but I demand access to my fellows who are
alive. Perhaps, I did not pay those others enough attention. How
could I? They cannot think. They cannot speak. They make a
complicated verbal noise, but all I am able to translate from it is,
that a something called lip-salve can be bought in some particular shop
one penny cheaper than it can in a certain other shop. They will
twitter for hours about the way a piece of ribbon was stitched to a hat
which they saw in a tramcar. They agitate themselves wondering whether
a muff should be this size or that size?--I say, they depress me, and
if I do turn my back on them when men are present I am only acting
sensibly and justly. Why cannot they twitter to each other and let me
and other people alone?"

She turned to me ag