“I have but to tell what I see. I have stopped imagining; my head has ached—Phil, you don’t know how it has ached—trying to imagine things. I am past that now; if you only shut your eyes and look, it is all easy. Take that old Edda story that I tried to work up, about the fellow who fought all day long against his bride’s father, and when night came the bride stole out and raised all the dead men on both sides, by magic, so that the next day, and every day, the battle raged on as before. I used to plan about the magic she used, and tried to invent a charm. Why, all she did was to pass over the battle-field at night, where the dead lay twisted in the frost, and while the wolves snarled around her and the spray from the fiord wet her cheek, she stooped to touch the dead men’s wrists; and they loosed their grip upon broken sword and split linden shield, their breath came again, soft and low like a baby’s, and so they slept till the red dawn.” “Look here,” said Atkinson, sitting up very straight, “you’ve been reading ‘The Finest Story in the World,’ and it has turned your head.” “Oh, the London clerk who was conscious of pre-existences, and forgot them all when he fell in love? I could have told Rudyard Kipling better than that myself.” Darnel gave an impatient whirl to the revolving chair. “You mean you think you can,” replied Atkinson, sharply. “As you like.” He spoke dreamily, and Atkinson dropped back on the pillow again, watching his friend as narrowly as the dim light would allow. Hard work and unearthly hours had told on Darnel; he certainly seemed light-headed. “Sickening heat—black frost—” he was murmuring; “marching, stealing, fighting, toiling—joy, pain—the life of the race—is a man to grow unconscious of these things in the moment that he really enters the life of the race, that he feels himself a part of it? What do you think, Phil?” “I think,” was the slow reply, “that whatever has happened to you in Vermont has shaken you up pretty well, old fellow. They say that when someone asked Rachel how she could play _Phèdre_ so devilishly well, she just opened her black Jewish eyes and said, ‘I have seen her.’ And I think, in the mood you’re in now, you can see as far back as Rachel or anybody else. It’s like being opium-drunk; if you could keep so, and put on paper what you see, you could beat Kipling and all the rest of them. But you can’t keep drunk, and you can’t write prose or verse on love-delirium. It’s been tried.” “Suppose Rachel had said, ‘I _am Phèdre_?’” Atkinson lifted his stout shoulders, laughing uneasily. “So much the worse. I should say, the less pre-existence of that sort the better. You might as well tell me the whole story, D. What is her name?”