“Oh, it’s all life,” insisted she, “the park and the countryside, and the virgin forest and the deep sea, with all things in them. It’s all life. I’m alive, and I daresay you are. You would exclude from life all that is nice in life, and then say of the remainder, that only is life. You’re not logical.” “Heaven forbid,” he murmured devoutly. “I’m sure you’re not, either. Only stupid people are logical.” She laughed lightly. “My poor carp little dream to what far paradoxes they have led,” she mused, looking into the water, which was now quite tranquil. “They have sailed away to their mysterious affairs among the lily-roots. I should like to be a carp for a few minutes, to see what it is like in those cool, dark places under the water. I am sure there are all sorts of strange things and treasures. Do you believe there are really water-maidens, like Undine?” “Not nowadays,” he informed her, with the confident fluency of one who knew. “There used to be; but, like so many other charming things, they disappeared with the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the rise of the Lutheran heresy. Their prophetic souls——” “Oh, but they had no souls, you remember,” she corrected him. “I beg your pardon; that was the belief that prevailed among their mortal contemporaries, but it has since been ascertained that they had souls, and very good ones. Their prophetic souls warned them what a dreary, dried-up planet the earth was destined to become, with the steam-engine, the electric telegraph, compulsory education (falsely so called), constitutional government, and the supremacy of commerce. So the elder ones died, dissolved in tears; and the younger ones migrated by evaporation to Neptune.” “Dear me, dear me,” she marvelled. “How extraordinary that we should just have happened to light upon a topic about which you appear to have such a quantity of special knowledge! And now,” she added, bending her head by way of valediction, “I must be returning to my duties.” And she moved off, towards the palace. IV And then, for three or four days, he did not see her, though he paid frequent enough visits to the feeding-place of the carp. “I wish it would rain,” he confessed to Hilary. “I hate the derisive cheerfulness of this weather. The birds sing, and the flowers smile, and every prospect breathes sodden satisfaction; and only man is bored.” “Yes, I own I find you dull company,” Hilary responded, “and if I thought it would brisk you up, I’d pray with all my heart for rain. But what you need, as I’ve told you a thousand times, is a love-affair with a red-haired woman.”