"I?" said I. "I don't like the atmosphere it produces. There may be ghosts, and spirits, and all that. The dead must be somewhere; there's no such place as nowhere. But they don't affect me particularly. Do they you?" "Well," he said, "no, not directly. Indirectly I suppose it does." "I think it makes a horribly depressing atmosphere, spiritualism," said I. "I want to kick." "Exactly! And ought one?" he asked in his terribly sane-seeming way. This made me laugh. I knew what he was up to. "I don't know what you mean by _ought_," said I. "If I really want to kick, if I know I can't stand a thing, I kick. Who's going to authorise me, if my own genuine feeling doesn't?" "Quite," he said, staring at me like an owl, with a fixed, meditative stare. "Do you know," he said, "I suddenly thought at dinner-time, what corpses we all were, sitting eating our dinners. I thought it when I saw you look at those little Jerusalem artichoke things in a white sauce. Suddenly it struck me, you were alive and twinkling, and we were all bodily dead. Bodily dead, if you understand. Quite alive in other directions, but bodily dead. And whether we ate vegetarian or meat made no difference. We were bodily dead." "Ah, with a slap in the face," said I, "we come to life! You or I or anybody." "I _do_ understand poor Lucy," said Luke. "Don't you? She forgot to be flesh and blood while she was alive, and now she can't forgive herself, nor the Colonel. That must be pretty rough, you know, not to realise it till you're dead, and you haven't, so to speak, anything left to go on. I mean it's awfully important to be flesh and blood." He looked so solemnly at us, we three broke simultaneously into an uneasy laugh. "Oh, but I _do_ mean it," he said. "I've only realised how very extraordinary it is to be a man of flesh and blood, alive. It seems so ordinary, in comparison, to be dead, and merely spirit. That seems so commonplace. But fancy having a living face, and arms, and thighs. Oh, my God, I'm glad I've realised in time!" He caught Mrs. Hale's hand, and pressed her dusky arm against his body. "Oh, but if one had died without realising it!" he cried. "Think how ghastly for Jesus, when he was risen and wasn't touchable! How very awful, to have to say _Noli me tangere_! Ah, touch me, touch me _alive_!" He pressed Mrs. Hale's hand convulsively against his breast. The tears had already slowly gathered in Carlotta's eyes and were dropping on to her hands in her lap.