Next morning he was up betimes; and the prospects of Humanity looked more glorious than ever. He gathered some of the finest pats from the butter-tree, and some fresh French rolls from the bread-tree. He discovered a cow close at hand, that allowed him at once to milk it; and a little roast pig ran up to him out of the underwood, and fawning on him with its trotters, said, 'Come, eat me.' The Professor vivisected it before Virginia's door, that its automatic noise, which the vulgar call cries of pain, might awaken her; and he then set it in a hot dish on the table. 'It has come! it has come!' he shouted, rapturously, as Virginia entered the room, this time in a blue silk dressing-gown, embroidered with flowers of gold. 'What has come?' said Virginia, pettishly, for she was suffering from a terrible headache, and the Professor's loud voice annoyed her. 'You don't mean to say that we are rescued, are we?' 'Yes,' answered Paul, solemnly; 'we are rescued. We are rescued from all the pains and imperfections of a world that has not learnt how to conform to the laws of matter, and is but imperfectly acquainted with the science of sociology. It is therefore inevitable that, the evils of existence being thus removed, we shall both be solemnly, stupendously, and unspeakably happy.' 'Nonsense!' said Virginia, snappishly, who thought the Professor was joking. 'It is not nonsense,' said the Professor, 'It is deducible from the teachings of John Stuart Mill, of Auguste Comte, of Mr. Frederic Harrison, and of all the exact thinkers who have cast off superstition, and who adore Humanity.' Virginia meanwhile ate _paté de foie gras_, of which she was passionately fond; and, growing a little less sullen, she at last admitted that they were lucky in having at least the necessaries of life left to them. 'But as for happiness--there is nothing to do here, there is no church to go to, and you don't seem to care a bit for my dressing-gown. What have we got to make us happy?' 'Humanity,' replied the Professor eagerly,--'Humanity, that divine entity, which is necessarily capable of everything that is fine and invaluable, and is the object of indescribable emotion to all exact thinkers. And what is Humanity?' he went on more earnestly; 'you and I are Humanity--you and I are that august existence. You already are all the world to me; and I very soon shall be all the world to you. Adored being, it will be my mission and my glory to compel you to live for me. And then, as modern philosophy can demonstrate, we shall both of us be significantly and unspeakably happy.' For a few moments Virginia merely stared at Paul. Suddenly she turned quite pale, her lips quivered, and exclaiming, 'How dare you!--and I, too, the wife of a bishop!' she left the room in hysterics.