“Are your people all women, or do you permit poor, imperfect, earthly man to enter your paradise?” he asked. “Our world is made up of human beings, and of course that means men and women,” she replied. “It would be a stupid place if it contained only women or only men. But our men are men, not merely creatures who pass as such, like so many one sees walking about here. And yet, I must confess that the men of my thought world are not quite so real to me as the women. I want to make them excellent, perfect; but I don’t succeed. When I get them just so far along, I seem unable to complete them, and so they are more or less dim and shadowy to me.” “Ah, I see,” said her listener. “Your ideal of mankind is too high for even your imagination to give form to. What are these men like who still seem dim to you? Some of them are knights and lords of high degree, or kings, perhaps?” “No; we don’t care for that kind. They would be too conceited for our world. We don’t like fighters, either. We have great men, of course, but they have earned their laurels; but even then they don’t talk about themselves, till they tire one all out like living men do. But we will not have any who are not truthful, and then they are courageous, for liars are always cowards, you know. And then, they are kind, very kind to everybody, and they don’t think themselves better than women. We couldn’t stand that, especially as our women are all so magnificent. I’m one of them, you know.” It was beautiful to him to see her so frankly reveal herself as she saw herself. “Your men do something, I suppose,--something more than to be merely agreeable?” he said. “We all work, but we dream too, and the dreamers are prized as highly as the workers if they dream good dreams.” “For a dreamer lives forever, And a toiler dies in a day,” hummed the stranger softly. Then in memory he turned to the past, murmuring, “Bohemia, thy grapes are sweet.” He saw again its hot and dusty highways, its tangled byways and the long procession traveling thereon. One by one they passed him in review, some with road-worn feet, faded garments and weary eyes; some stepping lightly, with joy in their hearts and flowers in their hands. There were the hopeful, the mirthful, the witty and the merry. There, too, were the baffled and beaten, the hopeless and the joyless. The successful went by with proud mien, and smiling face, and they who had failed also bore themselves erect and smiled, that the world might not dream of the pain at their hearts. “Their heads were bloody but unbound.” Grapes grew abundantly overhead, but a few, only a very few of the many travelers gathered them. He saw it all in memory as he had seen it all in reality. Now, as one by one the struggling, striving throng, dowered with the fateful gift of genius, passed again before him, he saw “Their faces all showed suffering, Though no voice uttered plaints.”