e for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous
to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable
and immortal. She did not say that they were immortal, however. "You
would--you will--hate us," she concluded. And I seemed only then to come
to myself. The power of her imagination was so great that I fancied
myself face to face with the truth. I supposed she had been amusing
herself; that she should have tried to frighten me was inadmissible. I
don't pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I said, amiably:
"You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful."

"I have made nothing," she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing
herself. She would explain origins, now.

"Your"--she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of
the country, or the populations of the earth--"your ancestors were mine,
but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you
overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted diseases,
as we shall contract them,--beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity
... of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and
sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts--you have
forgotten!"

She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionate
assurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith. We approached
a little roadside inn. On a bench before the door a dun-clad country
fellow was asleep, his head on the table.

"Put your fingers in your ears," my companion commanded.

I humoured her.

I saw her lips move. The countryman started, shuddered, and by a clumsy,
convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his eyes.
Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.

"I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion," I commented. "I
know there are words that have certain effects. But you shouldn't play
pranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus."

"It isn't good form, I suppose?" she sneered.

"It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, "the poor fellow has lost his
beer."

"What's that to me?" she commented, with the air of one affording a
concrete illustration.

"It's a good deal to him," I answered.

"But what to me?"

I said nothing. She ceased her exposition immediately afterward, growing
silent as suddenly as she had become discoursive. It was rather as if
she had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it. I was
quite at a l