“Dear friends,” he said, “let us ask ourselves in all humility of heart how often we are our own true selves. I would fain we were our true selves oftener. What is it that the Swan of Avon says, ‘To thine own self be true, and then you will be true to everybody else.’ Truth and lies! How wholly unlike they are, the one to the other. Let us sing the hymn ‘The sun is sinking fast’.... Golly, so it is, Pamela and the antiquarian lecture I meant to give you hasn’t been begun yet. Let’s go home. And my hair is full of grass-seeds with lying down.” “Stand still, and I’ll pick them out,” she said. She perceived in his sun-warmed hair the faint fragrance of the sea, and longed to bury her face in it. “No, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps they’ll sprout. I should like to have a hay-field on my head. I would sit in the hay.... Then, to skip a few centuries, when the Christians came to the island, they built a little shrine up here, and erected that bloated statue of the Virgin. I suppose they thought her image would disinfect the place from its Tiberian memories. But it doesn’t; it’s Pagan in spite of all their statues. You’re a Pagan, too, Pamela. That’s why you fit in so well up here.” “Yes, I’ve never believed in anything,” said she. “How can one believe in anything one doesn’t know of? I believe in what I see, and hear, and touch and feel. I know of nothing else but these things. I’m a flame that throws a little light round itself, so that it perceives. And then it’s blown out. All the more reason for making the most of it, while it’s alight.” They had begun the downward descent of the steep path, too narrow for two to walk abreast. Colin, just behind her, found his muscles twitching with intolerance of her shallowness. “Then you don’t fear death?” he asked. “Of course not. As long as things are pleasant, and I don’t have toothache or cancer, I don’t want to die. But if I was fearfully unhappy I shouldn’t think twice about dying. Or if----” She paused a moment: the path had broadened out, and there was room for them both. “Or if----” said he, stepping to her side. “Or if I was terribly happy,” she said softly. “It would be dull to go back to ordinary pleasantness after that. To flare up, and go out. Not a bad fate, Colin. Who wants to gutter away into old age?” He laughed.