“And yet they may happen!” said Francesca, her eyes still dreamily watching the sunlit heavens—­“Everything in the Universe is engaged in some sort of a fight, so it seems to me.  The tiniest insects are for ever combating each other.  In the very channels of our own blood the poisonous and non-poisonous germs are constantly striving for the mastery, and how can we escape the general ordainment?  Life itself is a continual battle between good and evil, and if it were not so we should have no object in living.  The whole business is evidently intended to be a dose conflict to the end.”

“There is no end!” I said.

She looked at me almost compassionately.

“So you imagine!”

I smiled.

“So I know!”

A vague expression flitted over her face,—­an expression with which I had become familiar.  She was a most lovable and intelligent creature, but she could not think very far,—­the effort wearied and perplexed her.

“Well, then, it must be an everlasting skirmish, I suppose!” she said, laughingly,—­“I wonder if our souls will ever get tired!”

“Do you think God ever gets tired?” I asked.

She looked startled,—­then amused.

“He ought to!” she declared, with vivacity—­“I don’t mean to be irreverent, but really, what with all the living things in all the millions of worlds trying to get what they ought not to have, and wailing and howling when they are disappointed of their wishes, He ought to be very, very tired!”

“But He is not,”—­I said;—­“If He were, there would indeed be an end of all!  Should the Creator be weary of His work, the work would be undone.  I wish we thought of this more often!”

She put her arm round me kindly.

“You are a strange creature!” she said—­“You think a great deal too much of all these abstruse subjects.  After all, I’m glad you are going on this cruise with the Harland people.  They will bring you down from the spheres with a run!  They will, I’m sure!  You’ll hear no conversation that does not turn on baths, medicines, massage, and general cure-alls!  And when you come on to stay with me in Inverness-shire you’ll be quite commonplace and sensible!”

I smiled.  The dear Francesca always associated ’the commonplace and sensible’ together, as though they were fitted to companion each other.  The complete reverse is, of course, the case, for the ‘commonplace’ is generally nothing more than the daily routine of body which is instinctively followed by beasts and birds as equally as by man, and has no more to do with real ‘sense’ or pure mentality than the ticking of a watch has to do with the enormous forces of the sun.  What we call actual ‘Sense’ is the perception of the Soul,- -a perception which cannot be limited to things which are merely material, inasmuch as it passes beyond outward needs and appearances and reaches to the causes which create those outward needs and appearances.  I was, however, satisfied to leave my friend in possession of the field of argument, the more readily as our parting from each other was so near at hand.