“You told me you would speak with perfect frankness.  With perfect frankness, then, answer me this question.  If you cannot love me, do you love another?”

“Certainly, I do not.”

“You do not love Taee’s sister?”

“I never saw her before last night.”  “That is no answer.  Love is swifter than vril.  You hesitate to tell me.  Do not think it is only jealousy that prompts me to caution you.  If the Tur’s daughter should declare love to you—­if in her ignorance she confides to her father any preference that may justify his belief that she will woo you, he will have no option but to request your immediate destruction, as he is specially charged with the duty of consulting the good of the community, which could not allow the daughter of the Vril-ya to wed a son of the Tish-a, in that sense of marriage which does not confine itself to union of the souls.  Alas! there would then be for you no escape.  She has no strength of wing to uphold you through the air; she has no science wherewith to make a home in the wilderness.  Believe that here my friendship speaks, and that my jealousy is silent.”

With these words Zee left me.  And recalling those words, I thought no more of succeeding to the throne of the Vril-ya, or of the political, social, and moral reforms I should institute in the capacity of Absolute Sovereign.

Chapter XXVI.

After the conversation with Zee just recorded, I fell into a profound melancholy.  The curious interest with which I had hitherto examined the life and habits of this marvellous community was at an end.  I could not banish from my mind the consciousness that I was among a people who, however kind and courteous, could destroy me at any moment without scruple or compunction.  The virtuous and peaceful life of the people which, while new to me, had seemed so holy a contrast to the contentions, the passions, the vices of the upper world, now began to oppress me with a sense of dulness and monotony.  Even the serene tranquility of the lustrous air preyed on my spirits.  I longed for a change, even to winter, or storm, or darkness.  I began to feel that, whatever our dreams of perfectibility, our restless aspirations towards a better, and higher, and calmer, sphere of being, we, the mortals of the upper world, are not trained or fitted to enjoy for long the very happiness of which we dream or to which we aspire.

Now, in this social state of the Vril-ya, it was singular to mark how it contrived to unite and to harmonise into one system nearly all the objects which the various philosophers of the upper world have placed before human hopes as the ideals of a Utopian future.  It was a state in which war, with all its calamities, was deemed impossible,—­a state in which the freedom of all and each was secured to the uttermost degree, without one of those animosities which make freedom in the upper world depend on the perpetual