"I?" laughed Brenda, leaning back in her chair. "Sakes, no, child! I've had a pretty good time so far, and I hope it won't be over just yet; but, after all, there must be a limit even to the combinations of human life, and a time would have to come when you'd just be doing the same old things over and over again. And, besides that, think of the horror of living on and on and seeing every one you loved--husband and wife, and children and grandchildren--grow old and die, and leave you alone in a world of strangers. No; life's a good thing if you only have fair play in the world; but so is death when you've lived your life. It's only like going to bed, after all. Eternal life would be like a day with no night to it, and that, I guess, would get a bit monotonous after a century or two. What do you think, Professor?" "My dear Miss van Huysman," replied her host with one of his rare but eloquent smiles, "since I began to study the question with anything like enlightenment, I have not been able to look upon what we call life, by which I mean existence in this or some other world, as anything but eternal. In its manifestations to our senses it is, I admit, merely transitory, a brief span of time between two other states which, for want of a better word, we may call two eternities; but I must confess that, to me, a human existence beginning with the cradle and ending with the grave is merely a more or less tragic riddle without an answer: in other words, a meaningless absurdity. I find it quite impossible to conceive any deity or presiding genius of the universe who could be guilty of such a colossally useless tragedy as human life would be under those circumstances." "I can't see it, my dear Marmion," said Brenda's father a trifle gruffly, for he had not yet quite recovered from the disquieting experiences of the afternoon. "What does it matter whether we live again or not as long as we live cleanly and do our work honestly while we are alive? Surely if we leave this world a little bit better, a little bit richer in knowledge, than we find it, these poor little lives of ours, such as they are, and that's not much--will not have been lived in vain. Of course, as you know, I'm just a common, low-down materialist who can't rise to the poetry of things as you can with this gorgeous theory of re-incarnation of yours. "I should very much like to believe it if I could, as I once said to an eminent revivalist on the war-path in the States; but the trouble with a man who is honest with himself is that he can no more make himself believe what doesn't seem true to him than he can make himself hungry when he isn't. All the horrible history of religious persecution is just the story of a lot of bigots in power trying to force helpless people to do what they couldn't do honestly. The awful part of the business is that they were most likely all wrong, and didn't know it."