As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said, playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are, must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O, you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously; "the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis, that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the moment when she breaks or kills a rose." Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked him. Only Karlson pleased him. At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting course. Therefore our immortality is necessary." Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said: "Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues? And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance, a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal, courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still be mortal."