"That you can say such things so calmly, and at such a moment--with all this" (she opened her arms as if passionately to embrace the beauty of the world)--"all this spread out before us, with only you and me to see it, the unconscious world not caring _that_"--she snapped her quick white fingers in the lazy air. "You sit there saying the eyes that glory in it, the hearts that ache at the wonder of it, _they_ are nothing; they are here to look on a moment, suffer, and die, while the great spectacle goes on and on and on. Why did we come here, then? What's the good of it?" "_I'll_ never tell you." "I'd begin to believe some of your libels on life if I thought there wasn't more in it than just--" "Just?" "That we are brought here with all _this_ inside us"--she drew her doubled hand across her breast like one in pain--"all this, and with the destiny of brutes--cheated a little while with gladness while we're children--" "_That's_ a superstition, too. The happiness of children is more than half an illusion of the old. _I_ remember. Others have forgotten; that's the difference." "No, no; I remember, too!" The raised voice was half challenge, half appeal. "_I_ was happy, and I'm happy still, except when you--" She broke off near the brink of tears. "And I mean to be happy. Oh, it's a good, _good_ world, and I'm glad I'm here." "_I'm_ glad you're here." "But if you were right"--she looked out with a vague fear to the fading west--"if all this keen consciousness existed just to be tortured a little while, and then flung down in the dark--if that is all"--the eager face grew white--"then human life's an outrage." Silence for a moment, and then in a low voice came the words: "It _is_ an outrage." "Don't say so, Ethan; I can't bear it." "Oh yes, we can all bear it; and by so much we ephemera get back our lost significance, our sovereignty." She looked up. "Through this strange fate of ours," he said, "we fulfil the end of the world." Old doctrinal associations flitted before the phrase, blurring for her his pagan use of it. "The end, the aim of the universe, seems to be beauty--beauty so varied in spirit and in form that it often gets strange names from men." "Yes, it is _all_ beautiful, isn't it, Ethan?" "That you can always see it so, and that even I can see it sometimes, proves we are not the lowest in the scale of life. That power of finding Beauty through her disguises is the best seal civilization sets on men." "And so even you believe we fulfil the end of the world?" He nodded.