“It would be impossible. Were it possible, what use would be a galvanized corpse? An unnatural unreal thing which would drop back into the dust of death.” He did not reply; he endeavored to control his emotion. “My dear Olga,” he said, when he could do so, “allow me to say one thing to you without causing you offence. Unknown to yourself, I think you cherish an illusion which can only cause you unhappiness. You think and speak as if your division from Adrian Vanderlin were but some quarrel, some mistake, which explanation, mediation, or time could clear away. You forget that you are entire strangers to each other; worse than strangers, because there is an irrevocable chasm between you.” She did not reply; an expression of intense suffering came into her eyes, but she restrained any outward utterance of it. “It hurts me to say these harsh things to you,” he continued. “I would so much sooner encourage you in your sentiment. But to what end should I do so? You are a woman of deep and passionate feeling. You do not forget; you do not change; your little boy’s grave is to you what Bethlehem was to the Early Christians; Vanderlin is to you what Ulysses was to Penelope. You never seem to realize that this past to which you cling is a wholly dead thing, no more to be imbued again with the breath of life than the body of your poor child, or the marble which lies over him. It is intolerable that a woman as young, as lovely, as rich, as admired and as admirable as you are should pass your years in obscurity fettered to a pack of useless memories like a living person, to a corpse. I have told you so often; I shall never cease to tell you so. What do you expect? What do you hope? What do you desire?” “Nothing.” The word was cold, incisive, harsh; he tortured her but she did not give any sign of pain except by the nervous gesture with which her fingers closed on the strings of pearls at her throat as if they were a _collier de force_ which compressed and suffocated her. “No one lives without desires or ends of some kind however absurd or unattainable they may be,” he said with truth. “I think you deceive yourself. I think that, without your being sensible of it, you brood so much over the past because you fancy vaguely that you will evolve some kind of future out of it, as necromancers used to stare into a crystal until they saw the future suggested on its surface. The crystal gave them nothing but what their own imagination supplied. So it is with you. Your imagination makes you see in Vanderlin a man who does not exist and never existed; and it also makes you fancy possible some kind of reconciliation or friendship which is as totally impossible as if you and he were both in your coffins.” She had turned from the window and walked to and fro the room, unwilling that he should see the emotion which his blunt speech awakened in her. There was a certain truth in them which she could not wholly deny and of which she was ashamed.