ikeness of his father?'

'Heroes beget sons worse than themselves, says the poet.'

'We are not talking now of men as they are, whom Homer's Zeus calls the
most wretched of all the beasts of the field; we are talking--are we
not?--of a perfect and archetypal Son, and a perfect and archetypal
Father, in a perfect and eternal world, wherein is neither growth,
decay, nor change; and of a perfect and archetypal generation, of which
the only definition can be, that like begets its perfect like?....
You are silent. Be so, Hypatia.... We have gone up too far into the
abysses....

And so they both were silent for a while. And Raphael thought solemn
thoughts about Victoria, and about ancient signs of Isaiah's, which were
to him none the less prophecies concerning The Man whom he had found,
because he prayed and trusted that the same signs might be repeated to
himself, and a child given to him also, as a token that, in spite of all
his baseness, 'God was with him.'

But he was a Jew, and a man: Hypatia was a Greek, and a woman--and for
that matter, so were the men of her school. To her, the relations
and duties of common humanity shone with none of the awful and divine
meaning which they did in the eyes of the converted Jew, awakened for
the first time in his life to know the meaning of his own scriptures,
and become an Israelite indeed. And Raphael's dialectic, too, though it
might silence her, could not convince her. Her creed, like those of her
fellow-philosophers, was one of the fancy and the religious sentiment,
rather than of the reason and the moral sense. All the brilliant
cloud-world in which she had revelled for years,--cosmogonies,
emanations, affinities, symbolisms, hierarchies, abysses, eternities,
and the rest of it--though she could not rest in them, not even believe
in, them--though they had vanished into thin air at her most utter
need,--yet--they were too pretty to be lost sight of for ever; and,
struggling against the growing conviction of her reason, she answered at
last--

'And you would have me give up, as you seem to have done, the sublime,
the beautiful, the heavenly, for a dry and barren chain of dialectic--in
which, for aught I know,--for after all, Raphael, I cannot cope with
you--I am a woman--a weak woman!'

And she covered her face with her hands.

'For aught you know, what?' asked Raphael gently.

'You may have made the worse appear the better reason.'

'So said Aristophanes of Socrates.