caught on;
they both looked rather grave, and the closest listener left off
laughing soonest.

"We can't be too grateful to science for its devotion to truth. But
isn't it possible for it to overlook one kind of truth in looking for
another? Isn't it imaginable that when a certain anthropoid ape went
wrong and blundered into a man, he also blundered into a soul, and as a
slight compensation for having involuntarily degenerated from his
anthropoid ancestor, came into the birthright of eternal life?"

"It's imaginable," the first speaker granted. "But science leaves
imagining things to religion and philosophy."

"Ah, that's just where you're mistaken!" the woman who had caught on
exclaimed. "Science does nothing but imagine things!"

"Well, not quite," the light skirmisher mocked.

She persisted unheeding: "First the suggestion from the mystical
somewhere--the same _where_, probably, that music and pictures and
poetry come from; then the hypothesis; then the proof; then the
established fact. Established till some new scientist comes along and
knocks it over."

"It would be very interesting if some one would proceed hypothetically
concerning the soul and its immortality, as the scientific people do in
their inquiries concerning the origin of man, electricity, disease, and
the rest."

"Yes," the light skirmisher agreed. "Why doesn't some fellow bet himself
that he has an undying soul and then go on to accumulate the proofs?"
The others seemed now to have touched bottom in the discussion, and he
launched a random inquiry upon the general silence. "By-the-way, I
wonder why women are so much more anxious to live again than men, as a
general thing."

"Because they don't feel," one of them at table ventured, "that they
have had a fair chance here."

"Oh! I thought maybe they felt that they hadn't had their say."

"Is it quite certain," the closest listener asked, "that they _are_ more
anxious to live again than men?" He looked round at the ladies present,
and at first none of them answered; perhaps because they feared the men
would think them weak if they owned to a greater longing than themselves
for immortality.

Finally the woman who had caught on said: "I don't know whether it's so
or not; and I don't think it matters. But I don't mind saying that I
long to live again; I am not ashamed of it. I don't think very much of
myself; but I'm interested in living. Then"--she dropped her voice a
little--"there are som