And primitive life seems like the spectrum of light—­composed of three primary colors, and white and black at the beginning and ending of it.  And the three colors of blue, red, and yellow have their counterparts in the three great passions in man—­to hunt his food, to continue his species, and to kill his enemy.

And white and black seem like birth and death—­and there is the sun, which is the soul and makes the colors, and allows of all combinations and graduations of beautiful other shades from them for parallels to all other qualities and instincts, only the original are those great primary forces—­to hunt his food, to continue his species, and to kill his enemy.

And if this is so to the end of time, man will be the same, I suppose, until civilization has emasculated the whole of nature and so ends the world!  Or until this wonderful new scientist has perfected his researches to the point of creating human life by chemical process, as well as his present discovery of animating jellyfish!

Who knows?  But by that time it will not matter to any of us!

Meanwhile, man is at the stage that when he loves a woman he wishes to possess her, and, in a modified form, he wishes to steal her, if necessary, from another, or kill the enemy who steals her from him.

But the Sun of the Soul is there, too, so the poor old world is not in such a very bad case after all.

And how the bon Dieu must smile sadly to Himself when He looks down on priests and nuns and hermits and fanatics, and sees how they have distorted His beautiful scheme of things with their narrow ideas.  Trying to eliminate the red out of His spectrum, instead of ennobling and glorifying it all with the Sun of the Soul.

And all of you who are great reasoners and arguers will laugh at this ridiculous little simile of life drawn by a woman; but I do not care.  I have had my outburst, and said what I wanted to.  So now we can get back to the two—­who were not yet lovers—­under their green tree in the Forest of Marly.

“But you must be able to guess the end,” Theodora was saying; “and oh, I want to know, if all the roads were barred by love—­how did they get out of the wood?”

“They took him with them,” said Lord Bracondale, and he touched the edge of her dress gently with a wild flower he had picked in the grass, while into his eyes crept all the passion he felt and into his voice all the tenderness.

Now if Theodora had ever read La Faute de L’Abbe Mouret she would have known just what proximity and the spring-time was doing for them both.

But she had not read, and did not know.  All she was conscious of was a wild thrilling of her pulses, an extraordinary magnetic force that seemed to draw her—­draw her nearer—­nearer to what?  Even that she did not know or ask herself.  Beyond that it was danger, and she must fly from it.

“I do not want to talk of any of those things to-day,” she said, suddenly dropping her parasol between them.  “I only want to laugh and be amused, and as you were to devise schemes for my happiness, you must amuse me.”