So it appears. And you will suffer for it. For, stiff and blank as you may determine to be, circumstances will overpower you. Under their influences you will not be able to avoid becoming softer and more redundant. But you will resist the process, I see, and you will make it as painful as you can. ARES. You discuss my case with a cheerful candour, Aphrodite. Are you sure of being happier yourself? APHRODITE. Not _sure_; but I have a reasonable confidence that I shall be fairly contented. For I, at least, am supple, and I court the influences which you think it a point of gallantry to resist. ARES. You will continue, I suppose, to make your main business the stimulating and the guiding of the affections? Here I admit that suppleness, as you call it, is in place. APHRODITE. Unfortunately, even here, immortality was no convenient prelude to our present state. We did not, indeed, neglect the heart---- ARES. If I forget all else, there must be events---- APHRODITE. Alas! we loved so briefly and with so facile a susceptibility, that I am tempted to ask myself whether in Olympus we really loved at all. ARES [_with ardour_]. There, at least, memory supplies me with no sort of doubt---- APHRODITE [_coldly_]. Let us keep to generalities. Looking broadly at our experience, I should say that the misfortune of the gods, as a preparation for their mortality, was that in their deathless state the affections fell at the foot of the tree, like these withered leaves. We should have fastened the branches of life together in long elastic wires of the thin-drawn gold of perdurable sentiment. ARES. The rapture, the violence, the hammering pulse, the bursting heart,--I see no resemblance between these and the leaves that flutter at our feet. APHRODITE. These leaves had their moment of vitality, when the sap rushed through their veins, when their tissue was like a ripple of sparkling emerald on the face of the smiling sky. But they could not preserve their glow, and they are the more hopelessly dead now, because they burned in their green fire so fiercely. ARES. We felt no shadow of coming disability strike across our pleasures. APHRODITE. No; but that was precisely what made our immortality such an ill preparation for a brief existence on this island. In Olympus the sentiment of yesterday was forgotten, and we realised the passion of to-day as little as the caprice of to-morrow. Perhaps this fragmentary tenderness was the real chastisement of our implacable prosperity. ARES [_in a very low voice_]. Can we not resume in this our exile, and with more prospect of continuity, the emotions which were so agreeable in our former state? So agreeable--although, as you justly say, too ephemeral [_coming a little closer_]. Can you not teach us to moderate and to prolong the rapture? APHRODITE [_rising to her feet_].