as a fearful discovery, and yet
hardly a discovery. Her heart had told her for years that she was hoping
against hope,--that she was struggling against a stream too mighty for
her. And now the moment had come when she must either be swept helpless
down the current, or, by one desperate effort, win firm land, and let
the tide roll on its own way henceforth.... Its own way?.... Not the
way of the gods, at least; for it was sweeping their names from off the
earth. What if they did not care to be known? What if they were weary of
worship and reverence from mortal men, and, self-sufficing in their own
perfect bliss, recked nothing for the weal or woe of earth? Must it not
be so? Had she not proof of it in everything which she beheld? What did
Isis care for her Alexandria? What did Athens care for her Athens?....
And yet Homer and Hesiod, and those old Orphic singers, were of another
mind.... Whence got they that strange fancy of gods counselling,
warring, intermarrying, with mankind, as with some kindred tribe?

'Zeus, father of gods and men.'.... Those were words of hope and
comfort.... But were they true? Father of men? Impossible!--not father
of Pelagia, surely. Not father of the base, the foul, the ignorant....
Father of heroic souls, only, the poets must have meant.... But where
were the heroic souls now? Was she one? If so, why was she deserted by
the upper powers in her utter need? Was the heroic race indeed extinct?
Was she merely assuming, in her self-conceit, an honour to which she had
no claim? Or was it all a dream of these old singers? Had they, as some
bold philosophers had said, invented gods in their own likeness, and
palmed off on the awe and admiration of men their own fair phantoms?....
It must be so. If there were gods, to know them was the highest bliss
of man. Then would they not teach men of themselves, unveil their own
loveliness to a chosen few, even for the sake of their own honour, if
not, as she had dreamed once, from love to those who bore a kindred
flame to theirs?....What if there were no gods? What if the stream of
fate, which was sweeping away their names; were the only real power?
What if that old Pyrrhonic notion were the true solution of the problem
of the Universe? What if there were no centre, no order, no rest, no
goal--but only a perpetual flux, a down-rushing change? And before her
dizzying brain and heart arose that awful vision of Lucretius, of the
homeless Universe falling, falling,