“Oh, you barbarian!  You great child!  You yellow giant-thing of the frost!  You believer of old nurse tales and stomach satisfactions!  But the spirit of you, that which cannot die, where will it go when your body is dead?”

“As I have said, Valhalla,” I answered.  “And my body shall be there, too.”

“Eating?—­drinking?—­fighting?”

“And loving,” I added.  “We must have our women in heaven, else what is heaven for?”

“I do not like your heaven,” she said.  “It is a mad place, a beast place, a place of frost and storm and fury.”

“And your heaven?” I questioned.

“Is always unending summer, with the year at the ripe for the fruits and flowers and growing things.”

I shook my head and growled: 

“I do not like your heaven.  It is a sad place, a soft place, a place for weaklings and eunuchs and fat, sobbing shadows of men.”

My remarks must have glamoured her mind, for her eyes continued to sparkle, and mine was half a guess that she was leading me on.

“My heaven,” she said, “is the abode of the blest.”

“Valhalla is the abode of the blest,” I asserted.  “For look you, who cares for flowers where flowers always are? in my country, after the iron winter breaks and the sun drives away the long night, the first blossoms twinkling on the melting ice-edge are things of joy, and we look, and look again.

“And fire!” I cried out.  “Great glorious fire!  A fine heaven yours where a man cannot properly esteem a roaring fire under a tight roof with wind and snow a-drive outside.”

“A simple folk, you,” she was back at me.  “You build a roof and a fire in a snowbank and call it heaven.  In my heaven we do not have to escape the wind and snow.”

“No,” I objected.  “We build roof and fire to go forth from into the frost and storm and to return to from the frost and storm.  Man’s life is fashioned for battle with frost and storm.  His very fire and roof he makes by his battling.  I know.  For three years, once, I knew never roof nor fire.  I was sixteen, and a man, ere ever I wore woven cloth on my body.  I was birthed in storm, after battle, and my swaddling cloth was a wolfskin.  Look at me and see what manner of man lives in Valhalla.”

And look she did, all a-glamour, and cried out: 

“You great, yellow giant-thing of a man!” Then she added pensively, “Almost it saddens me that there may not be such men in my heaven.”

“It is a good world,” I consoled her.  “Good is the plan and wide.  There is room for many heavens.  It would seem that to each is given the heaven that is his heart’s desire.  A good country, truly, there beyond the grave.  I doubt not I shall leave our feast halls and raid your coasts of sun and flowers, and steal you away.  My mother was so stolen.”

And in the pause I looked at her, and she looked at me, and dared to look.  And my blood ran fire.  By Odin, this was a woman!