"One moment, before I give you an answer," she replied. "You are not altogether wrong in calling this heaven, although it is little more than the ante-chamber between earth and heaven. It is my heaven at present, but it will not be my heaven always, any more than it will be always your hell, and although it is heaven, it is not _the_ heaven. Of that neither you nor I can form any shadowy conception. Now for your question. There is only one thing which troubles me, and that is ignorance. I had always thought that in the spirit-world one would know everything. I don't mean that I expected to find myself omniscient, but I did think that I should know all one would wish to know. I need hardly tell you I was wrong. With whatever knowledge we have acquired and with whatever intellectual ability we have developed up to the point of our leaving the earth-world, with that, and with no more, do we make our first start in the spirit realm. I do think our capability of intuitionally apprehending truth is in some way intensified by the transition which you speak of as death: but of intellectual change there is absolutely none; and there are things relating to the after-life, as well as to the earthly one, concerning which (never having studied them whilst I was in the body) I am far more ignorant than are many dwellers under the sun." "That I can well believe," I replied; "but putting aside the fact that you are troubled sometimes by a consciousness of ignorance, tell me if in other respects you are happy." "No good can come to one of being in a place where everything is too easy," she answered, "and if heaven were the abode of perfect happiness--this heaven, I mean--I think we should find it somewhat wearisome. When I was on earth I longed for heaven, _not that I might be delivered from sorrow, but from sinfulness_; and I think I may say that I am as happy here as my failures will let me be." "Your failures!" I exclaimed, wonderingly, "your failures!" "Yes," she said, "my failures. On earth failure is, as you know, the law of progress, and even here progress is only achieved through that which is, after all, in some degree a non-success. I don't quite know how to make my meaning clear to you, but perhaps we can't do better than look back to the old earth-life for an illustration. That earth-life--the life which we lead on earth, I mean--is, as you know, poor, pitiable and paltry; we feel it so, we cannot but feel it so, when it is viewed in the lofty light of our possibilities. Each morning finds us beginning the world afresh, and with the high hope that at last the time has come when we shall be true to ourselves and to our aspirations, that at last we shall veritably and indeed do some lasting work for God and for our fellow-creatures. And each evening! ah! each evening! is it not ever the same sad story, ever the same old bitter experience? You have spoken of it yourself in those verses you sent me so many years ago: