‘Tears, little one!’ I said.  ’See how they swim like whitebait in the fishpools of your eyes!’

‘Oh, yes, the whitebait,’ rejoined the Sphinx, glad of a subject to hide her emotion.  ’Now tell me something nice about them, though the poor little things have long since disappeared.  Tell me, for instance, how they get their beautiful little silver waterproofs?’

‘Electric Light of the World,’ I said, ’it is like this.  While they are still quite young and full of dreams, their mother takes them out in picnic parties of a billion or so at a time to where the spring moon is shining, scattering silver from its purse of pearl far over the wide waters,—­silver, silver, for every little whitebait that cares to swim and pick it up.  The mother, who has a contract with some such big restaurateur as ours, chooses a convenient area of moonlight, and then at a given sign they all turn over on their sides, and bask and bask in the rays, little fin pressed lovingly against little fin—­for this is the happiest time in the young whitebait’s life:  it is at these silvering parties that matches are made and future consignments of whitebait arranged for.  Well, night after night, they thus lie in the moonlight, first on one side, then on the other, till by degrees, tiny scale by scale, they have become completely lunar-plated.  Ah! how sad they are when the end of that happy time has come!’

‘And what happens to them after that?’ asked the Sphinx.

’One night when the moon is hidden their mother comes to them with treacherous wile, and suggests that they should go off on a holiday again to seek the moon—­the moon that for a moment seems captured by the pearl-fishers of the sky.  And so off they go merrily, but, alas! no moon appears; and presently they are aware of unwieldy bumping presences upon the surface of the sea, presences as of huge dolphins; and rough voices call across the water, till, scared, the little whitebaits turn home in flight—­to find themselves somehow meshed in an invisible prison, a net as fine and strong as air, into which, O agony! they are presently hauled, lovely banks of silver, shining like opened coffers beneath the coarse and ragged flares of yellow torches.  The rest is silence.’

‘What sad little lives! and what a cruel world it is!’ said the Sphinx—­as she crunched with her knife through the body of a lark, that but yesterday had been singing in the blue sky.  Its spirit sang just above our heads as she ate, and the air was thick with the grey ghosts of all the whitebait she had eaten that night.

But there were no longer any tears in her eyes.

THE ANSWER OF THE ROSE

The Sphinx and I sat in our little box at Romeo and Juliet.  It was the first time she had seen that fairy-tale of passion upon the stage.  I had seen it played once before—­in Paradise.  Therefore, I rather trembled to see it again in an earthly play-house, and as much as possible kept my eyes from the stage.  All I knew of the performance—­but how much was that!—­was two lovely voices making love like angels; and when there were no words, the music told me what was going on.  Love speaks so many languages.