Hermia felt herself paling, but she exclaimed impatiently: “Don’t talk to me of ideals—those poor, pale photographs of ourselves, who have neither mind nor will nor impulse; who jump out like puppets as the strings are pulled; who respond to every mood and grin to every smile! They are born of the supreme egoism of human nature, which admits no objective influence to any world of its own creating—an egoism which demands vengeance for the humiliation of spirit one is called upon to endure in the world of men. Your other arguments were good, however. I like them, although I will not discuss them until you have further elaborated. In the mean time solve another problem. What is the reason that, when a woman falls in love, she immediately, if a believer, has an increase of religious feeling; if a non-believer, she has a desire to believe, so that she may pray? Sentimentality? The softening of her nature under the influence of love? The general awakening of her emotional possibilities?” “Neither—or all, indirectly. She is not drawn to God in the least. She is drawn to the idealized abstraction of her lover, who, in the mists of her white-heated imagination, assumes the lineaments of the being most exalted by tradition. If there were a being more exalted still than God, her lover’s phantom would be re-christened with his name instead. It is to her lover that she prays—the intermediate being is a pretty fiction—and she revels in prayer, because it gives her a dreamy and sensuous nearness to her lover.” Hermia sprang to her feet and paced the narrow platform with rapid steps. “It is well I have no ‘pretty fictions,’” she said, “you would shatter them to splinters.” He rose also. “No,” he said, “I would never shatter any of your ideals. Such as you believe in and I do not, I will never discuss with you.” Hermia stood still and looked away from him and through the hemlock forest, with its life outstretched above and its death rotting below. The shadows were creeping about it like ghosts of the dead bracken beneath their feet. The mist was rolling over the mountain and down the cataract; it lay like a soft, thin blanket on the hurrying waters. Hermia drew closer to Quintard and looked up into his face. “Do you believe,” she said, “that perfect happiness can be—even when affinities meet?”