“These are just words, sir,” he began: “but how much you misunderstand what is going on here. This apparent revelry is an effort to keep from swooning: it is the forced continuance of a life familiar to us, when that life is to be crushed into nothingness; it is the defiance of habit, the revolt against extinction, the mortal protest against the infamous tyranny of circumstances. It is a delirium of indulgence, to forget what is coming upon us; a moment’s arbitrary refusal to think of the future, a dance, in whose whirl we shall remit the impulses of suicide. It is unreasonable, but its monstrous unreasonableness to you sir, measures our appalling sense of the disaster we can not stop to think of, measures the intensity of the recoil from obliteration; like the dressed and garlanded victim of an Aztec immolation we taste again the festive sweets upon which perhaps our cloyed appetites are no longer to feed. We are the sufferers in this eviction; the greatest, the poor, the artisan, laborer, the vast mediocrity lose something, but it amounts to little more than the exchange of one station here, for another of the same sort somewhere else. In a material sense our loss is incalculable; half our riches disappears but with that loss goes social prestige, title, and the moral consciousness of elevation, the breath of our nostrils. I, sir, am ----.” Leacraft did not move; his astonishment was too sharply focussed upon all the astounding previous confession. “And,” continued the man, “the ruin of worldly fortune seems small, after all, compared with the sacrifice of that dignified and sheltered life, which moved serenely, with every accompaniment of joy, in these delightful abodes, and under the protecting aegis of an inexpressible separation from the rest of the world. But”--he seemed to wish to justify himself, somehow, as he noticed the still petrified stare of Leacraft--“we have not been neglectful of the matters of adjustment. Committees have been appointed, plans laid, funds appropriated, agents despatched, for the selection of our new homes, and though we take our flight with lopped wings, our plumage may in time resume its former beauty. Do not misunderstand us because of these assemblies. We too carry deeper than you the pain of an unutterable grief.”