“Oh, no!  Not that, I hope!” The word alarmed her.  It was worse than pope.  Through her puzzled mind stole a stealthy, dangerous thing ... like a panther.

“I like to think that even in decay there’s life,” the painter murmured.  “The falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency, there’s force and motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in the breaking up and crumbling of everything indeed.  And take an inert stone:  it’s crammed with heat and weight and potencies of all sorts.  What holds its particles together indeed?  We understand it as little as gravity or why a needle always turns to the ‘North.’  Both things may be a mode of life....”

“You think a compass has a soul, Mr. Sanderson?” exclaimed the lady with a crackling of her silk flounces that conveyed a sense of outrage even more plainly than her tone.  The artist smiled to himself in the darkness, but it was Bittacy who hastened to reply.

“Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies,” he said quietly, “may be due to some kind of life we cannot understand.  Why should water only run downhill?  Why should trees grow at right angles to the surface of the ground and towards the sun?  Why should the worlds spin for ever on their axes?  Why should fire change the form of everything it touches without really destroying them?  To say these things follow the law of their being explains nothing.  Mr. Sanderson merely suggests—­poetically, my dear, of course—­that these may be manifestations of life, though life at a different stage to ours.”

“The ‘_ breath_ of life,’ we read, ’He breathed into them.  These things do not breathe.”  She said it with triumph.

Then Sanderson put in a word.  But he spoke rather to himself or to his host than by way of serious rejoinder to the ruffled lady.

“But plants do breathe too, you know,” he said.  “They breathe, they eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to their environment as men and animals do.  They have a nervous system too... at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of nerve cells.  They may have memory too.  Certainly, they know definite action in response to stimulus.  And though this may be physiological, no one has proved that it is only that, and not—­psychological.”

He did not notice, apparently, the little gasp that was audible behind the yellow shawl.  Bittacy cleared his throat, threw his extinguished cigar upon the lawn, crossed and recrossed his legs.

“And in trees,” continued the other, “behind a great forest, for instance,” pointing towards the woods, “may stand a rather splendid Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees—­some huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organized as our own.  It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions, so that we could understand it by being it, for a time at least.  It might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life.  The pull of a big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming.”