She smiled, and said, “Push me over the cigarettes.”

She struck a match, kindled the little crackling tube, and threw the light out into the shrubbery.  It traced a tiny arc of flame and vanished.  The sky was full of the mewing of lost kittens, it seemed.  The sound came from innumerable peewits, that fled and circled above the slopes of the darkening meadows below.

“What an uncomfortable seer you are!” she said, “to people this dear human night with your fancies.  No doubt, now, you will read between the lines of that bird speech down there?” (She looked at me curiously, but with none of the mournful speculativeness of a soul struggling against the dimness of its own vision.) “To me it is articulate happiness—­nothing more abstruse.  Yes, I have seen a mastodon; and I was as glad to happen on the beast as a naturalist is glad to find a missing link in a chain of evidence.  From the moment, I knew myself quite clearly to be the recovered heir to this abused planet.”

She paused a moment, and contracted her brows, as if regretfully and in anger.  “If I had only seen it sooner!” she cried, low; “before I had, in my pride of strength, tested the poison that has bewildered the brains of my sisters!”

Her general reserve was her self-armour against the bolts of the Philistines.  What worldling would not have read mania in much that was spoken by this sane woman?  Yet, indeed, if we were all to find the power to give expression to our inmost thoughts, madness and sanity would have to change places in the order of affairs.

“Once,” said Dinah—­“and it was when I was a young woman—­a man in whom I was interested shipped as passenger on a whaling vessel.  This friend was what is called a degenerate.  Physically and morally he had yielded his claim to any share in that province of the sun, that his race had conquered and annexed only to find it antipathetic to its needs.  Combative effort was grown impossible to him, as in time it will grow to you all.  You drop from the world like dead flies from a wall.  He could not physic his soul with woods, and groves, and waters.  To his perceptions, life was become an abnormality—­a disease of which he sickened, as you all must when the last of the fever of aggression has been diluted out of your veins.  You die of your triumph, as the bee dies of his own weapon of offence; and you can find no antidote to the poison in the nature you have inoculated with your own virus.

“This man contemplated self-destruction as the only escape.  He had sought distraction of his moral torments in travel long and varied.  Many of the most beautiful, of the historically interesting places of the world, he had visited and sojourned in—­without avail.  His haunting feeling, he said, was that he did not belong to himself.  Pursued by this Nemesis, he came home to end it all.  He still proclaimed his spiritual independence; but it was immeshed, and he must tear the strands.