Such men as he (Florian) continue to dream, and I confess such men are dangerous: for they obstinately aspire toward a perfectibility that does not exist, they will be content with nothing else; and when your master and I do not satisfy the desire which is in their dreams, they draw their appalling logical conclusions. To that humiliation, such as it is, I answer Drink! For the Oracle of Babcuc also--that oracle which the little curé of Meudon was not alone in misunderstanding--that oracle speaks the true wonder word. The Archangel Michael wants to know what our dreams matter to the angels and the demons: “They matter much to them,” answers Jennicot. “Men go enslaved by this dream of beauty: but never yet have they sought to embody it, whether in their wives or in their equally droll works of art, without imperfect results, without results that were maddening to the dreamer. Men are resolved to know that which they may wholeheartedly worship. No, they are not bent upon emulating what they worship: it is rather that holiness also is a dream which allures mankind resistlessly.” Whereupon Saint Michael and Mr. Jennicot, in their perplexity, go back to their cups. They have a great need of shaking off their thoughts. Man’s dreaming is for both of them a topic of foremost importance. Are not they produced by it? But to judge by dreamers’ pace in Cabell’s novels, and by the wreckage of dreams strewing their path, what does the future have in store for archangels and demons? Jennicot and St. Michael console themselves by trying to reconcile their antinomies _inter pocula_, among symbolic cups in which, according to the author, life and death, reality and dreams, evil and wrong, god and devil, all become mixed and lose their identity: “Meanwhile he does not drink, he merely dreams, this little Florian,” observes M. Jennicot, who seems to be the favorite interpreter of the novelist. “He dreams of beauty and of holiness fetched back by him to an earth which everywhere fell short of his wishes, fetched down by him intrepidly from that imagined high place where men attain to their insane desires. He dreams of aspiring and joy and color and suffering and unreason, and of those quaint taboos which you and he call sin, as being separate things, not seeing how all blends in one vast cup. Nor does he see, as yet, that this blending is very beautiful, when properly regarded and very holy when approached without human conceit.” Then the two faces which bent over Florian were somehow blended into one face, and Florian knew that these two beings had melted into one person, and that this person was prodding him very gently.