to me did she betray her continuous sleepiness and lack of interest in the whole affair.  Members propounded stupendously solemn questions about the “salvation of man,” the “state of progress,” the mystic meaning of passages of the Bible, and the like; and I watched her draw on her memory for answers.  She was never at a loss, and her interlocutors went away, and named their little child-thoughts after her.

I took her away at last and whispered some things in her ears, and showed her what could be seen of moon and stars from the narrow street, and something of the old summer feeling came over us.  How the old time sang sorrowfully back, plaintively, piteously.  Our steps sounded along some silent streets, the doors of the little houses were shut and dark.  They might have been the under doors of tombs.  Silently we walked along together, and life sang its little song to us from the depths of its prison.  It sounded like the voice of a lover now lost for ever, one worth more beyond compare than any that could come after.

There is no going back.  I saw her to her little home and touched her tenderly at Goodbye.

She went in.  The door closed and I was left standing alone in front of the closed door, and there was none around but myself.  Then I was aware of a gust in the night-breeze blowing up for rain.  Time had changed.  Something had been taken from the future and something had been added to the past.  The spiral gusts lifted the unseen litter of the street, and with them the harpies rose in my breast.  And words impetuous would have burst out like the torrents of rain which the dark sky threatened.

The torrent came.

A girl like this simply grows like a flower on a heath, blossoms, fades, withers, and is lost.  No more than that.  I scarcely tell what I want to say.  Oh, how strongly I would whisper it into the inmost heart!  Life is not thoughts, is not calm, is not sights, is not reading or music, is not the refinement of the senses,—­Life is—­life.  This is the great secret.  This is the original truth, and if we had never begun to think, we should never have lost our instinctive knowledge.  In one place flowers rot and die; in another, bloom and live.  The truth is that in this city they rot and die.  This is not a suitable place for a strong life; men and women here are too close together, there is not enough room for them, they just spring up thinly and miserably, and can reach no maturity, and therefore wither away.  All around are the ill-constituted, the decaying, the dying.  What chance had fresh life coming into the tainted air of this stricken city—­this city where provision is made only for the unhealthy?  For here, because something is the matter, every one has begun conscience-dissecting—­thinking—­and a rumour has got abroad that we live to get thoughts of God.  And because thoughts of God are novel and comforting, they have been raised up as the great desideratum.  And the state of society responsible for the production of these thoughts is considered blessed.  The work of intensifying the characteristics of that society is thought blessed, and because in ease we think not, we prefer to live in disease.  And the progress of disease we call Progress.  So Progress and Thought are substituted for Life.