eg you to observe, Madame,
that according to the Science of Organic Metamorphosis created by
Lamarck and Darwin, the wings of birds have been successively
transformed into fore-feet in the case of quadrupeds and into arms in
the case of the Linnaean primates. And you may remember, Maurice, that by
a rather annoying reversion to type, Miss Kate, your English nurse, who
used to be so fond of giving you a whipping, had arms very like the
pinions of a plucked fowl. One may say, then, that a being possessing
both arms and wings is a monster and belongs to the department of
Teratology. In Paradise we have Cherubim and Kerubs in the shape of
winged bulls, but those are the clumsy inventions of an inartistic god.
It is nevertheless true, quite true, that the Victories of the Temple of
Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis are beautiful, and possess both
arms and wings; it is also true that the Victory of Brescia is
beautiful, with her outstretched arms and her long wings folded on her
mighty loins. It is one of the miracles of Greek genius to have known
how to create harmonious monsters. The Greeks never err. The Moderns
always."

"Yet on the whole," said Madame des Aubels, "you have not the look of a
pure Spirit."

"Nevertheless, I am one, Madame, if ever there was one. And it ill
becomes you, who have been baptised, to doubt it. Several of the
Fathers, such as St. Justin, Tertullian, Origen, and Clement of
Alexandria thought that the Angels were not purely spiritual, but
possessed a body formed of some subtile material. This opinion has been
rejected by the Church; hence I am merely Spirit. But what is spirit and
what is matter? Formerly they were contrasted as being two opposites,
and now your human science tends to reunite them as two aspects of the
same thing. It teaches that everything proceeds from ether and
everything returns to it, that the same movement transforms the waves
of air into stones and minerals, and that the atoms scattered throughout
illimitable space, form, by the varying speed of their orbits, all the
substance of this material world."

But Madame des Aubels was not listening. She had something on her mind,
and to put an end to her suspense, she asked:

"How long have you been here?"

"I came with Maurice."

"Well--that's a nice thing!" said she, shaking her head. But the Angel
continued with heavenly serenity:

"Everything in the Universe is circular, elliptical, or hyperbolic, and
the same la