for two o'clock. As early
as one o'clock Dr. Trublet had taken his accustomed place in Nanteuil's
dressing-room.

Felicie, who was being dressed by Madame Michon, reproached her doctor
with having nothing to say to her. Yet it was she who, preoccupied, her
mind concentrated upon the part which she was about to play, was not
listening to him. She gave orders that nobody should be allowed to come
into her dressing-room. For all that, she received Constantin Marc's
visit with pleasure, for she found him sympathetic.

He was getting excited. In order to conceal his agitation he made a
pretence of talking about his woods in the Vivarais, and began to tell
shooting stories and peasants' tales, which he did not finish.

"I am in a funk," said Nanteuil. "And you, Monsieur Marc, don't you feel
qualms in the stomach?"

He denied feeling any anxiety. She insisted:

"Now confess that you wish it were all over."

"Well, since you insist, perhaps I would rather it were over."

Whereupon Dr. Socrates, with a simple expression and in a quiet voice,
asked him the following question:

"Do you not believe that what must be accomplished has already been
accomplished, and has been accomplished from all time?"

And without waiting for a reply he added:

"If the world's phenomena reach our consciousness in succession, we must
not conclude from that that they are really successive, and we have
still fewer reasons to believe that they are produced at the moment when
we perceive them."

"That's obvious," said Constantin Marc, who had not listened.

"The universe," continued the doctor, "appears to us perpetually
imperfect, and we are all under the illusion that it is perpetually
completing itself. Since we perceive phenomena successively, we actually
believe that they follow one another. We imagine that those which we no
longer see are in the past, and those which we do not yet see are in the
future. But it is possible to conceive beings built in such fashion that
they perceive simultaneously what we regard as the past and the future.
We may conceive beings who perceive phenomena in a retrograde order,
and see them unroll themselves from our future to our past. Animals
disposing of space otherwise than ourselves, and able, for instance, to
move at a speed greater than that of light, would conceive an idea of
the succession of phenomena which would differ greatly from our own."

"If only Durville is not going to rag me on the stage