"Yes?"
"One must live," said she quickly. "I do not mean that we must eat and
sleep--these mechanical matters are settled for many of us, but life
consists in thinking, and nothing else, yet many people go from the
cradle to the grave without having lived differently from animals. I
do not want to be one of them. Their whole theory of life is
mechanical. They eat and drink. They invite each other to their
houses to eat and drink, and they use such speech as they are gifted
with in discussing their food and whatever other palpable occurrence
may have chanced to them in the day. It is a step, perhaps, towards
living, but it is still only one step removed from stagnation. They
have some interest in an occurrence, but how that occurrence happened,
and what will result from it does not exercise them in the least, and
these, which are knowledge and prophecy, are the only interesting
aspects of any event."
"But," said I, "you have not told me why you sit for a full hour
staring at vacancy, and thumping on your knee with your hand?"
She continued--.
"Sometimes one meets certain people who have sufficient of the divine
ferment in their heads to be called alive: they are almost always men.
We fly to them as to our own people. We abase ourselves before them in
happy humility. We crave to be allowed to live near them in order that
we may be assured that everything in the world is not nonsense and
machinery--and then, what do we find--?"
She paused, and turned a large fierce eye upon me.
"I do not know," said I, and I endeavoured vainly to look everywhere
but at her eye.
"We find always that they are married," said she, and, saying so, she
lapsed again to a tense and worried reflection.
"You have not told me," I insisted gently, "why you peer earnestly into
space, and thump at intervals upon your knee with the heel of your
fist?"
"These men," said she sternly, "are surrounded by their wives. They
are in gaol and their wives are their warders. You cannot go to them
without a permit. You may not speak to them without a listener. You
may not argue with them for fear of raising an alien and ridiculous
hostility. Scarcely can you even look at them without reproach.--How
then can we live, and how will the torch of life be kept alight?"
"I do not know," I murmured.
She turned her pale eye to me again.
"I am not beautiful," said she.
But there was just a tremor of doubt in her voice, so that the apparent
statement became packed with curiosity, and had all the quality of a
question.