sitting out on the top step we talked for hours, she without
the yashmak.

We fell to talking about the Bible. And says she: 'What did Cain to
Abel?'

'He knocked him over,' I replied, liking sometimes to use such idioms,
with the double object of teaching and perplexing her.

'Over what?' says she.

'Over his heels,' said I.

'I do not complehend!'

'He killed him, then.'

'That I know. But how did Abel feel when he was killed? What is it to be
_killed_?'

'Well,' said I, 'you have seen bones all around you, and the bones of
your mother, and you can feel the bones in your fingers. Your fingers
will become mere bone after you are dead, as die you must. Those bones
which you see around you, are, of course, the bones of the men of whom
we often speak: and the same thing happened to them which happens to a
fish or a butterfly when you catch them, and they lie all still.'

'And the men and the butterfly feel the same after they are dead?'

'Precisely the same. They lie in a deep drowse, and dream a
nonsense-dream.'

'That is not dleadful. I thought that it was much more dleadful. I
should not mind dying.'

'Ah!... so much the better: for it is possible that you may have to die
a great deal sooner than you think.'

'I should not mind. Why were men so vely aflaid to die?'

'Because they were all such shocking cowards.'

'Oh, not all! not all!'

(This girl, I know not with what motive, has now definitely set herself
up against me as the defender of the dead race. With every chance she is
at it.)

'Nearly all,' said I: 'tell me one who was not afraid--'

'There was Isaac,' says she: 'when Ablaham laid him on the wood to kill
him, he did not jump up and lun to hide.'

'Isaac was a great exception,' said I: 'in the Bible and such books, you
understand, you read of only the best sorts of people; but there were
millions and millions of others--especially about the time of the
poison-cloud--on a very much lower level--putrid wretches--covetous,
false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the
earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes.'

This, for several minutes, she did not answer, sitting with her back
half toward me, cracking almonds, continually striking one step with the
ball of her outstretched foot. In the clarid gold of the platform I saw
her fez and corals reflected as an elongated blotch of florid red. She
turned and drank some wine from the great gold Jarvan gobl