“No, that’s not a bit like it. I don’t know how long I had been asleep, but I dreamed that I woke up suddenly, and that the moonlight was streaming in at the window. Right in the middle of the moonlight was the beetle, standing up on his hind legs. He had grown ever so much bigger, and was as tall as I am. ‘Come on, now,’ he said. ‘How much longer are you going to keep me waiting? I’m late, as it is.’ “I didn’t feel the least bit afraid of him. I just asked him where we were going. He opened the window, and pointed upwards. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you must wait till I’m dressed, else I shall catch cold.’ However, he wouldn’t wait, and so I got out of bed. We climbed up on to the table in front of the window. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘you must keep hold of my fore-leg, or you’ll fall.’ We didn’t fly or walk; we floated out of the window, and then upwards, going very quickly and steadily, as if a wind were blowing us. As we were floating up, the beetle’s head changed till it became just like Aunt Julia’s. ‘Marjorie’s an unnatural child,’ it said in Aunt Julia’s voice. ‘She doesn’t care for dolls--doesn’t care for anything except music and Maurice.’” Maurice had an unworthy and needless impression that the girl was making some of this up. He looked at her curiously, as though he were going to say something; but he refrained, and she continued her dream-- “I didn’t quite know what to say, but I told the beetle that he was entirely wrong--that I liked papa and mamma very much indeed, and rather liked almost everybody. Then I asked him how he managed to speak, being a beetle, and how he could hear me speak. He told me that neither of us had spoken a word: when I contradicted him, he said that if I had gone back to my own room I should have found that my real body was still lying asleep in bed. ‘Now,’ he pointed out, ‘you can’t speak without your body--so that is proved.’ Then he said that beetles never spoke, and that as a matter of fact we were not speaking, but just understanding each other’s silence. Still, it seemed just like speaking. We must have moved very quickly, because by this time we had got quite beyond the moon. I could see it ever so far beneath my feet, and the stars all scattered about the darkness; yet I didn’t remember passing them on our way up. I didn’t feel at all cold. As the beetle went on talking--it was just like real talking, so it doesn’t matter whether it was real or not--he stopped being like Aunt Julia. He got his own head back again, and his own voice--except that sometimes it began to be rather like yours. You haven’t gone to sleep, have you?” Maurice had not gone to sleep, and said so.