He showed only his unmoved face. This talk, so impersonal, with all its revealment of human pathos and weakness, so much a picture that they both looked at it together,--a picture of outlived woe,--claimed no more than his contemplation; but when her voice seemed to grope toward him, questioning in its very clearness of declaration, he felt again the flitting fear that he had already recognized, not as danger, but as discomfort. It flitted only, hardly stirred the calm he showed her, as the wings of a flying bird just skim and ruffle the surface of still, deep waters. That restless bird, always hovering, circling near, its shadow passing, repassing over the limpid water--he saw and knew it as the water might reflect in its stillness the bird’s flight. Life; the will to live, the will to want, and to strive, and to suffer in striving. All the waters of Eppie’s soul were broken by the flight of this bird of life; its wings, cruel and beautiful, furrowed and cut; its plumage, darkly bright, was reflected in every wave. He said nothing after her last words. “You think all feelings delusions, Gavan?” “Not that, perhaps, but very transitory; and to be tied to the transitory is to suffer.” “On that plan one ends with nothingness.” “Do you think so?” “Do _you_ think so?” She turned his question on him and her eyes, with the question, fixed hard on his face. He felt suddenly that after all the parrying and thrusting she had struck up his foil and faced him with no mask of gaiety--in deadly earnest. There was the click of steel in the question. He did not know whether he were the more irritated, for her sake, by her persistency, or the more fearful that, unwillingly, he should do her faith some injury. “I think,” he said, “more or less as Tolstoi thinks. You understood all that very well the other evening; so why go into it?” “You think that our human identity is unreal--an appearance?” “Most certainly.” “And that the separation between us is the illusion that makes hatred and evil, and that with the recognition of the illusion, love would come and all selfish effort cease?” “Yes.” “And don’t you see that what that results in is the Hindoo thing, the abolishing of consciousness, the abolishing of life--of individual life?” “Yes, I see that,” Gavan smiled, “but I’m a little surprised to see that you do. So many people are like Aunt Barbara.” But Eppie was pushing, pushing against the closed doors and would not be lured away by lightness. “Above all, Gavan, do you see that he is merely an illogical Hindoo when he tries to bridge his abyss with ethics? On his own premises he is utterly fatalistic, so that the very turning from the evil illusion, the very breaking down of the barrier of self, is never, with him, the result of an effort of the will, never a conscious choice, but something deep and rudimentary, subconscious, an influx of revelation, a vision that sets one free, perhaps, but that can only leave one with emptiness.”