"Ah, that's just where you're mistaken!" the woman who had caught on exclaimed. "Science does nothing but imagine things!" "Well, not quite," the light skirmisher mocked. She persisted unheeding: "First the suggestion from the mystical somewhere--the same _where_, probably, that music and pictures and poetry come from; then the hypothesis; then the proof; then the established fact. Established till some new scientist comes along and knocks it over." "It would be very interesting if some one would proceed hypothetically concerning the soul and its immortality, as the scientific people do in their inquiries concerning the origin of man, electricity, disease, and the rest." "Yes," the light skirmisher agreed. "Why doesn't some fellow bet himself that he has an undying soul and then go on to accumulate the proofs?" The others seemed now to have touched bottom in the discussion, and he launched a random inquiry upon the general silence. "By-the-way, I wonder why women are so much more anxious to live again than men, as a general thing." "Because they don't feel," one of them at table ventured, "that they have had a fair chance here." "Oh! I thought maybe they felt that they hadn't had their say." "Is it quite certain," the closest listener asked, "that they _are_ more anxious to live again than men?" He looked round at the ladies present, and at first none of them answered; perhaps because they feared the men would think them weak if they owned to a greater longing than themselves for immortality. Finally the woman who had caught on said: "I don't know whether it's so or not; and I don't think it matters. But I don't mind saying that I long to live again; I am not ashamed of it. I don't think very much of myself; but I'm interested in living. Then"--she dropped her voice a little--"there are some I should like to see again. I have known people--characters--natures--that I can't believe are wasted. And those that were dear to us and that we have lost--" She stopped, and the first speaker now looked at her with a compassion unalloyed by patronage, and did not ask, as he might, "What has all that to do with it?" In fact, a sympathetic silence possessed the whole company. It was broken at last by the closest listener's saying: "After all, I don't know that Metchnikoff's book is so very blighting. It's certainly a very important book, and it produces a reaction which may be wholesome or unwholesome as you choose to think. And no matter what we believe, we must respect the honesty of the scientific attitude in regard to a matter that has been too much abandoned to the emotions, perhaps. In all seriousness I wish some scientific man would apply the scientific method to finding out the soul, as you"--he turned to the light skirmisher--"suggest. Why shouldn't it be investigated?"