Oh, no! that was just it. She always said: "Pray don't let me hear the least thing about the horrid place." You remember that she very strongly disapproved of my going there at all---- CHLORIS. Yes; I remember that Arethusa, when she brought me back my daffodils, told me how angry Demeter was---- PERSEPHONE. And yet she was quite nice to my husband when once Zeus had decided that I had better go. [_There is a pause._ MAIA _rises and leans on the parapet, over the woods, now drowned in twilight, to the sea, which still faintly glitters. She turns and comes back to the other two, standing above them._] MAIA. I, too, might have observed something as I went sailing over the purpureal ocean. But I was always talking to my sisters. The fact is we all of us neglected to learn anything about death. CHLORIS. We thought of it as of something happening in that world of Hades which could never become of the slightest importance to us. Who could have imagined that we should have to take it into practical account? MAIA. Well, now we shall have to accept it, to be prepared for its tremendous approach. CHLORIS [_after a pause_]. Perhaps this famous "death" may prove after all to be only another kind of life. [_Rising and approaching_ MAIA.] Don't you think this is indicated even by the song of these barbarians? Besides, our stay here must be the ante-chamber to something wholly different. MAIA. We can hardly suppose that it can lead to nothing. CHLORIS. No; surely we shall put off more or less leisurely, with dignity or without it, the garments of our sensuous existence, and discover something underneath all these textures of the body? PERSEPHONE. One of our priests in Hades, I do remember, sang that silence was a voice, and declared that even in the deserts of immensity the soul was stunned and deafened by the chorus and anti-chorus of nature. CHLORIS. What did he mean? What is the soul? MAIA. I must confess that in this our humility, our corporeal degradation, instead of feeling crushed, I am curiously conscious of a wider range of sensibility. Perhaps that is the soul? Perhaps, in the suppression of our immortality, something metallic, something hermetical, has been broken down, and already we stand more easily exposed to the influences of the spirit? CHLORIS. In that case, to slough the sheaths of the body, one by one, ought to be to come nearer to the final freedom, and the last coronation and consecration of existence may prove to be this very "death" we dread so much. PERSEPHONE. I can fancy that such conjectures as these may prove to be one of the chief sources of satisfaction in this new mortality of ours: the variegated play of light and shadow thrown upon it. Well, the less we know and see, the more exciting it ought to be to guess and to peer. MAIA.