“Not a bit,” he replied; “we are pining for music and want you to sing, if you are not too tired. What learned book were you reading, after such a journey? Plato?” “A translation of the ‘Phaedo,’” she said. “There is such a strange little bit here about pleasure being mixed with pain always.” “Oh, they had found that out in those days, had they?” said Frithiof. “Read the bit to me; for, to tell you the truth, it would fit in rather well with this return to Bergen.” Cecil turned over the pages and read the following speech of Socrates: “‘How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they never come to man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem; and I cannot help thinking that if Æsop had noticed them he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why, when one comes the other follows.’” “It’s odd to think that all these hundreds of years people have been racking their brains to find some explanation of the great problem,” said Frithiof, “that generation after generation of unsatisfied people have lived and died.” “A poor woman from East London once answered the problem to me quite unconsciously,” said Cecil. “She was down in the country for change of air, and she said to me, ‘It’s just like Paradise here, miss, and if it could always go on it would be heaven.’” He sighed. “Come and sing me ‘Princessen,’” he said, “if you are really not too tired. I am very much in the mood of that restless lady in the poem.” And, in truth, often during those days at Bergen he was haunted by the weird ending of the song— “‘What _do_ I then want, my God?’ she cried Then the sun went down.”