And Ethelbert, well knowing that woman’s dislike of folly and sickness would turn men away from both, if woman were free to rise to her own heights, said calmly: “It is precisely because you hate fools that you will conspire with me, his mother, and other angels of God, to annihilate the fool and evoke the man. Two children, Waldemar and Reginald,—is it not so? Your Waldemar is your son, and better born than Reginald. For after that assault you were deserted by your assailant, and lived in virginal conditions through all the time of the coming of your son to this present incarnation. You have lived since, loathing evil, seeking the good and pursuing it, and—in an humble sense—pondering these things in your heart, as did the mother of our Lord; and—” “Aye, I hate him! I would gladly have been like the Virgin Mother, reverently treated, by the spirit-of-life in some good man,—if not by the Angel of the Annunciation. Mystery and unfathomable mystery as it all is, I claim I should have had the highest and best. I am a good girl; I am from a good family. I love that story; I love the mystery as the good Father in our mountain village in Germany taught it. I meant always to be like Mary, blessed among women. Reginald betrothed me; and betrothal is almost marriage in my land.” She turned, and gazing again back toward Reginald’s chair, said again: “Aye, I hate him! Beast, brute! I think—I think I must kill him! I do hate him! What will my Waldemar think of me! I hate that _man_!” “Who?” said Ethelbert. “That man,” said Bertha, with a point of her finger, like a sword-thrust. And Reginald, as if shocked by an electric charge, sent forth a cry, springing forward as if galvanized; and Bertha, frightened, heard Ethelbert say, steadily: “There is no man there,—a crippled child, an absent spirit, a wraith, a wreck, a ghost, a ‘remains’ of the criminal who was arrested in the act of killing a citizen of this nation, called Reginald Grove; that ‘remains’ is there; nothing more. A child waiting to come forth to the business of making one more try at self-management, is there.” “You were right,” Ethelbert continued, not unobservant meanwhile of Bertha’s alarm at the effect of the electric-battery which her finger had fired at Reginald, and at the flush which had mounted Reginald’s face. “You are right in saying there are too many born and buried. Let us not bury him (this ‘remains’), but let us electrify him into newness of spirit, and then he will not need rebirth of the body. Give him another chance. You and Waldemar shall have yours.”