“You torture my words into an interpretation of which I never dreamed, and look upon all things through the distorting lenses of your own moodiness.  It is worse than useless for us to attempt an amicable discussion, for your bitterness never slumbers, your suspicions are ever on the qui vive.”

She rose, but he quickly laid his hand on her shoulder, and pressed her back into the chair.

“You will be so good as to sit still, and hear me out.  I have a right to all my charming, rose-colored views of this world.  I have gone to and fro on the earth, and life has proved a Barmecide’s banquet of just thirty-eight years’ duration.”

“But, sir, you lacked the patience and resolution of Shacabac, or, like him, you would have finally grasped the splendid realities.  The world must be conquered, held in bondage to God’s law and man’s reason, before we can hope to levy tribute that will support our moral and mental natures; and it is only when humanity finds itself in the inverted order of serfdom to the world, that it dwarfs its capacities, and even then dies of famine.”

The scornful gleam died out of his eyes, and mournful compassion stole in.

“Ah! how impetuously youth springs to the battlefield of life!  Hope exorcises the gaunt spectre of defeat, and fancy fingers unwon trophies and fadeless bays; but slow-stepping experience, pallid, blood-stained, spent with toil, lays her icy hand on the rosy veil that floats before bright, brave, young eyes, and lo’ the hideous wreck, the bleaching bones, the grinning, ghastly horrors that strew the scene of combat!  No burnished eagles nor streaming banners, neither spoils of victory nor paeans of triumph, only silence and gloom and death—­slow-sailing vultures—­and a voiceless desolation!  Oh, child! if you would find a suitable type of that torn and trampled battlefield—­the human heart—­when vice and virtue, love and hate, revenge and remorse, have wrestled fiercely for the mastery—­go back to your Tacitus, and study there the dismal picture of that lonely Teutoburgium, where Varus and his legions went down in the red burial of battle!  You talk of ’conquering the world—­ holding it in bondage!’ What do you know of its perils and subtle temptations—­of the glistening quicksands whose smooth lips already gape to engulf you?  The very vilest fiend in hell might afford to pause and pity your delusion ere turning to machinations destined to rouse you rudely from your silly dreams.  Ah! you remind me of a little innocent, happy child, playing on some shining beach, when the sky is quiet, the winds are hushed, and all things wrapped in rest, save

   ’The water lapping on the crag,
    And the long ripple washing in the reeds’—­