“If you are going to talk metaphysics I’ll cut and run, I warn you. Socratic methods of tripping one up always infuriate me.” “I’m only trying to talk common-sense.” “Well, go on. I agree to what you say of a real identity. We’ve that, of course.” “Well, then, can an identity destroyed at death by the destruction of the body be called real? It can’t, Jim. It’s either only a result of the body, a merely materialistic phenomenon, or else it is a transient, unreal aspect of some supremely real World-Self and its good and its evil just as fated by that Self’s way of thinking it as the color of its hair and eyes is fated by nature. And if that were so the sense of freedom, of identity, that gives us our only sanction for goodness, truth, and worth, would be a mere illusion.” Her earnestness, as she worked it out for him, held his eyes more than her words his thoughts. He was observing her with such a softening of expression as rarely showed itself on his virile countenance. “You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?” he said. “I’ve tried to. Knowing Gavan has made me. It has converted me,” she smiled. “So that’s your conversion.” “Oh, more than that. I know that I’m _in_ life; _for_ it, and that’s more than all such reasoning.” “And you believe that you’ll go on forever as you are now,” he said. His eyes dwelt on her: “Young and beautiful.” “_Forever_; what queer words we must use to try to express it. We are in Forever now. It’s just that one casts in one’s lot, open-eyed, with life.” “And has Palairet cast in his with death?” Again the change of color was in her cheek, but it was to pallor now. “He thinks so.” “And he doesn’t frighten you?” She armed herself to smile over Gavan’s old question. “Why should he?” Grainger left her for some moments of aimless, silent wandering. He came back and paused again before her. He did not answer her. “I throw in my lot with life, too, Eppie,” he said, “and I ask no more of it than the here and the now of our human affair. But that I do ask with all my might, and if might can give it to me, I’ll get it.” She looked up at him gravely, without challenge, with a sympathy too deep for pity. “At all events,” he added slowly, “at all events, in so far, our lots are cast together.” “Yes,” she assented. His eyes studied hers; his keen mind questioned itself: Could a woman look so steadily, with such a clear, untroubled sympathy, upon such a love as his, were there no great emotion within her, controlling her, absorbing her, making her indifferent to all lesser appeals? Had this negative, this aimless, this ambiguous man, captured, without any fight for it, her strong, her reckless heart? So he questioned, while Eppie still answered his gaze with eyes that showed him nothing but their grave, deep friendship. “So it’s a contest between life and death?” he said at last. “Between me and Gavan you mean?”