explain what the human mind is.  My father-in-law thinks that it is God’s hobby—­but he can’t explain who or what God is.  Nollie is silent.  And Monsieur Lavendie hasn’t yet told us what he thinks.  What do you think, monsieur?” The thin-faced, big-eyed man put up his hand to his high, veined brow as if he had a headache, reddened, and began to speak in French, which Fort followed with difficulty.

“For me the Universe is a limitless artist, monsieur, who from all time and to all time is ever expressing himself in differing forms—­always trying to make a masterpiece, and generally failing.  For me this world, and all the worlds, are like ourselves, and the flowers and trees—­little separate works of art, more or less perfect, whose little lives run their course, and are spilled or powdered back into this Creative Artist, whence issue ever fresh attempts at art.  I agree with Monsieur Laird, if I understand him right; but I agree also with Madame Laird, if I understand her.  You see, I think mind and matter are one, or perhaps there is no such thing as either mind or matter, only growth and decay and growth again, for ever and ever; but always conscious growth—­an artist expressing himself in millions of ever-changing forms; decay and death as we call them, being but rest and sleep, the ebbing of the tide, which must ever come between two rising tides, or the night which comes between two days.  But the next day is never the same as the day before, nor the tide as the last tide; so the little shapes of the world and of ourselves, these works of art by the Eternal Artist, are never renewed in the same form, are never twice alike, but always fresh-fresh worlds, fresh individuals, fresh flowers, fresh everything.  I do not see anything depressing in that.  To me it would be depressing to think that I would go on living after death, or live again in a new body, myself yet not myself.  How stale that would be!  When I finish a picture it is inconceivable to me that this picture should ever become another picture, or that one can divide the expression from the mind-stuff it has expressed.  The Great Artist who is the whole of Everything, is ever in fresh effort to achieve new things.  He is as a fountain who throws up new drops, no two ever alike, which fall back into the water, flow into the pipe, and so are thrown up again in fresh-shaped drops.  But I cannot explain why there should be this Eternal Energy, ever expressing itself in fresh individual shapes, this Eternal Working Artist, instead of nothing at all—­just empty dark for always; except indeed that it must be one thing or the other, either all or nothing; and it happens to be this and not that, the all and not the nothing.”

He stopped speaking, and his big eyes, which had fixed themselves on Fort’s face, seemed to the latter not to be seeing him at all, but to rest on something beyond.  The man in khaki, who had risen and was standing with his hand on his wife’s shoulder, said: