Kathleen.  Oh! how we shall run against each other.  What fun it will be!

L. No, no, Miss Katie; I can’t allow any running against each other.  The atoms never do that, whatever human creatures do.  You must all know your places, and find your way to them without jostling.

Lily.  But how ever shall we do that?

Isabel.  Mustn’t the ones in the middle be the nearest, and the outside ones farther off—­when we go away to scatter, I mean?

L. Yes; you must be very careful to keep your order; you will soon find out how to do it; it is only like soldiers forming square, except that each must stand still in her place as she reaches it, and the others come round her; and you will have much more complicated figures, afterwards, to form, than squares.

Isabel.  I’ll put a stone at my place:  then I shall know it.

L. You might each nail a bit of paper to the turf, at your place, with your name upon it:  but it would be of no use, for if you don’t know your places, you will make a fine piece of business of it, while you are looking for your names.  And, Isabel, if with a little head, and eyes, and a brain (all of them very good and serviceable of their kind, as such things go), you think you cannot know your place without a stone at it, after examining it well,—­how do you think each atom knows its place, when it never was there before, and there’s no stone at it?

Isabel.  But does every atom know its place?

L. How else could it get there?

Mary.  Are they not attracted into their places?

L. Cover a piece of paper with spots, at equal intervals; and then imagine any kind of attraction you choose, or any law of attraction, to exist between the spots, and try how, on that permitted supposition, you can attract them into the figure of a Maltese cross, in the middle of the paper.

Mary (having tried it).  Yes; I see that I cannot:—­one would need all kinds of attractions, in different ways, at different places.  But you do not mean that the atoms are alive?

L. What is it to be alive?

Dora.  There now; you’re going to be provoking, I know.

L. I do not see why it should be provoking to be asked what it is to be alive.  Do you think you don’t know whether you are alive or not?

(Isabel skips to the end of the room and back.)

L. Yes, Isabel, that’s all very fine; and you and I may call that being alive:  but a modern philosopher calls it being in a “mode of motion.”  It requires a certain quantity of heat to take you to the sideboard; and exactly the same quantity to bring you back again.  That’s all.

Isabel.  No, it isn’t.  And besides, I’m not hot.

L. I am, sometimes, at the way they talk.  However, you know, Isabel, you might have been a particle of a mineral, and yet have been carried round the room, or anywhere else, by chemical forces, in the liveliest way.