"A wingless little eagle on a barren tree," he smiled. "I advise you to complicate life with ideals. The more the better. They are more serviceable than a conscience, in which I presume you're likewise lacking, because you don't have to use them. A conscience is an immediate annoyance, whereas ideals are charming procrastinations. They excuse the inanity of the present. Good Lord, what do you think about all day without ideals to guide you?" Dorn looked at her and felt again delight with himself. It was because her interest had returned. Her eyes were flatteries. He desired to be amusing, to cover the eager child face beside him with a caress of words. "I don't think," she answered. "Do people ever think? I always imagine that people have ideas that they look at and that the ideas never move around." "Yes," he agreed, "moving ideas around is what you might call thinking. And people don't do that. They think only of destinations and for purposes of forgetting something--drugging themselves to uncomfortable facts. I fancy, however, I'm wrong. It's only after telling a number of lies that one gets an idea of what might be true. Thus it occurs to me now that I can't conceive of an intelligent person thinking in silence. Intelligence is a faculty which enables people to boast. And it's difficult boasting in silence. And inasmuch as it's necessary to be intelligent to think, why, that sort of settles it. Ergo, people never think. Do you mind my chatter?" "Please ..." A perfect applause this time. Her sincerity appealed to him as an exquisite mannerism. She said "Please" as if she were breathless. "You're an entertaining listener," he smiled. "And very clever. Because it's ordinarily rather difficult to flatter me. I'm immensely delighted with your silence, whereas ..." Dorn stumbled. He felt his speech was degenerating into a compliment. "Because you tell me things I've known," the girl spoke. "Yet I tell you nothing." He stared for an instant at the people in the street. "Nothing" was a word his thought tripped on. He was used to mumbling it to himself as he walked alone in streets. And at his desk it often came to him and repeated itself. Now his thought murmured, "Nothing, nothing," and a sadness drew itself into his heart. He laughed with a sense of treating himself to a theatricalism. "We haven't talked about God," he announced. "God is one of my beliefs." She was an idiot for frowning. "I dislike to think of man as the product of evolution. It throws an onus on the whole of nature. Whereas with a God to blame the thing is simple." She nodded, which was doubly idiotic, inasmuch as there was nothing to nod to. He went on: