"I am in a funk," said Nanteuil. "And you, Monsieur Marc, don't you feel qualms in the stomach?" He denied feeling any anxiety. She insisted: "Now confess that you wish it were all over." "Well, since you insist, perhaps I would rather it were over." Whereupon Dr. Socrates, with a simple expression and in a quiet voice, asked him the following question: "Do you not believe that what must be accomplished has already been accomplished, and has been accomplished from all time?" And without waiting for a reply he added: "If the world's phenomena reach our consciousness in succession, we must not conclude from that that they are really successive, and we have still fewer reasons to believe that they are produced at the moment when we perceive them." "That's obvious," said Constantin Marc, who had not listened. "The universe," continued the doctor, "appears to us perpetually imperfect, and we are all under the illusion that it is perpetually completing itself. Since we perceive phenomena successively, we actually believe that they follow one another. We imagine that those which we no longer see are in the past, and those which we do not yet see are in the future. But it is possible to conceive beings built in such fashion that they perceive simultaneously what we regard as the past and the future. We may conceive beings who perceive phenomena in a retrograde order, and see them unroll themselves from our future to our past. Animals disposing of space otherwise than ourselves, and able, for instance, to move at a speed greater than that of light, would conceive an idea of the succession of phenomena which would differ greatly from our own." "If only Durville is not going to rag me on the stage!" exclaimed Felicie, while Madame Michon was putting on her stockings under her skirt. Constantin Marc assured her that Durville did not even dream of any such thing, and begged her not to be uneasy. And Dr. Socrates resumed his discourse.