“More true, I fancy, of the daughter of men than of the supposed Sons of the Gods,” retorted Alan, with a laugh, half startled by her words, and wholly charmed by the indescribable fascination of the way in which she said them; “for the daughters of men were so fair that the Sons of the Gods lost heaven itself for their sakes.” “Even so!” said Olga, looking him full in the eyes, and at that moment the signal sounded for them to take their places in the cars. A couple of minutes after they had taken their seats, the train drew out of the station with an imperceptible, gliding motion, so smooth and frictionless that it seemed rather as though the people standing on the platform were sliding backwards than that the train was moving forward. The speed increased rapidly, but so evenly that, almost before they were well aware of it, the passengers were flying over the snow-covered landscape, under the bright, heatless sun and pale, steel-blue sky of a perfect winter’s morning, at a hundred miles an hour, the speed ever increasing as they sped onward. The line followed the general direction of the present route to Dover, which was reached in about half an hour. Without pausing for a moment in its rapid flight, the express swept out from the land over the Channel Bridge, which spanned the Straits from Dover to Calais at a height of 200 feet above the water. Travelling at a speed of three miles a minute, seven minutes sufficed for the express to leap, as it were, from land to land. As they swept along in mid-air over the waves, Olga pointed down to them and said to Alan, who was sitting in the armchair next her own-- “Imagine the time when people had to take a couple of hours getting across here in a little, dirty, smoky steamboat, mingling their sorrows and their sea-sickness in one common misery! I really think this Channel Bridge is worthy even of your admiration. Come now, you have not admired anything yet”-- “Pardon me,” said Alan, with a look and a laugh that set Serge’s teeth gritting against each other, and brought the ready blood to Olga’s cheeks; “on the contrary, I have been absorbed in admiration ever since we started.” “But not apparently of our engineering triumphs,” replied Olga frankly, taking the compliment to herself, and seeming in no way displeased with it. “It would seem that the polite art of flattery is studied to some purpose in Aeria.” “There you are quite wrong,” returned Alan, still speaking in the same half-jocular, half-serious vein. “Before all things, we Aerians are taught to tell the absolute truth under all circumstances, no matter whether it pleases or offends; so, you see, what is usually known as flattery could hardly be one of our arts, since, as often as not, it is a lie told in the guise of truth, for the sake of serving some hidden and perhaps dishonest end.”