When at last a voice issued from his profound immobility she felt the assault of terror, as if a phantom had spoken. “There is an imperfect being in contemplation with me,” the figure said. “It is I, Lychnis,” she answered meekly. He seemed scarcely aware of her. He was indeed dead in the body. “An echo reaches me. A voice that spoke once in the world of unreality.” His tones were the high, uncertain tones of a spirit. He turned his face, and it was illuminated by an unearthly brilliance. It was like talking with a god enthroned in a ghostly radiance of the night sky, and the floor between them seemed a gulf of interstellar space. “Here on this lonely earth,” she answered, “speaks a mouth you have kissed.” “What do you desire of me?” “I desire to talk about ourselves and about love.” She was suddenly sharp and insistent. One sees her seated on a cushion, her head bent attentively towards him, or hanging somewhat like a child’s, and when her head was hanging like that, one learns, it was because she had become aware of a new, surprising element—an element of disrespect. “Ourselves? Love? Self and love are renounced and forgotten, or if remembered they are the remembered pain of some past life.” He spoke like a dreamer in paradise, unwilling to wake. “That is taking things very seriously,” she said, speaking thoughts that astonished her as they came into her mind. “Perhaps, after all, love is not a thing to be taken so seriously.” A quiver of pain troubled her as she said it, remembering what delights she had thought to obtain from life and love. Did he stir in his cave of radiance? “The moment of love is past. It was perfect, and needs no addition. In any sense that is not tedious it lives forever, and may be continually enjoyed by those who live in the blissful regions of non-being. The personal in love is nothing.” “All the same,” she put in, “it is delicious.” “In love,” he repeated, “there is one moment that is eternal. As in art there is a moment of perfect balance, which cannot be added to or diminished without ruin, so in love.” “Then,” she said, mocking, “I am for promiscuity. The more moments the better.” “But the delights of the lover and the artist,” he replied, “if they could be prolonged for ever, would not be worth even a hint of the experience of non-being.” Alongside this verbal exchange, alongside the mockery that had come so unexpectedly to life in her mind, she was hurt with images of days they had spent together. She resumed: “I will not talk mockery. Let us be plain about the issue. We loved. We experienced the beginnings of a perfect life together. You have broken it. You have made a renunciation in accordance with the tradition of your family. You have sacrificed me to attain your queer paradise. I want you to satisfy me that it was right to do so.”