“It is not that,”—­he said, with a little vexation—­“When I saw you I recognised you to be a very transparent creature, devoted to innocent dreams which are not life.  But that secret which you are reported to possess—­the secret of wonderful abounding exhaustless vitality—­how does it happen that you have it?  I myself see that force expressed in your very glance and gesture, and what puzzles me is that it is not an animal vitality; it is something else.”

I was silent.

“You have not a robust physique,”—­he went on—­“Yet you are more full of the spirit of life than men and women twice as strong as you are.  You are a feminine thing, too,—­and that goes against you.  But one can see in you a worker—­you evidently enjoy the exercise of the accomplishments you possess—­and nothing comes amiss to you.  I wonder how you manage it?  When you joined us on this trip a few days ago, you brought a kind of atmosphere with you that was almost buoyant, and now I am disappointed, because you seem to have enclosed yourself within it, and to have left us out!”

“Have you not left yourselves out?” I queried, gently.  “I, personally, have really nothing to do with it.  Just remember that when we have talked on any subject above the line of the general and commonplace your sole object has been to ‘draw’ me for the amusement of yourself and Dr. Brayle—­”

“Ah, you saw that, did you?” he interrupted, with a faint smile.

“Naturally!  Had you believed half you say you were told of me, you would have known I must have seen it.  Can you wonder that I refuse to be ’drawn’?”

He looked at me with an odd expression of mingled surprise and annoyance, and I met his gaze fully and frankly.  His eyes shifted uneasily away from mine.

“One may feel a pardonable curiosity,” he said, “And a desire to know—­”

“To know what?” I asked, with some warmth—­“How can you obtain what you are secretly craving for, if you persist in denying what is true?  You are afraid of death—­yet you invite it by ignoring the source of life!  The curtain is down,—­you are outside eternal realities altogether in a chaos of your own voluntary creation!”

I spoke with some passion, and he heard me patiently.

“Let us try to understand each other,” he said, after a pause—­ “though it will be difficult.  You speak of ‘eternal realities.’  To me there are none, save the constant scattering and re-uniting of atoms.  These, so far as we know of the extraordinary (and to me quite unintelligent) plan of the Universe, are for ever shifting and changing into various forms and clusters of forms, such as solar systems, planets, comets, star-dust and the like.  Our present view of them is chiefly based on the researches of Larmor and Thomson of Cambridge.  From them and other scientists we learn that electricity exists in small particles which we can in a manner see in the ‘cathode’ rays,—­and these particles are called ‘electrons.’