"I have lived a great deal in castles," he said, in explanation. "I know the life well." Her past, too, it would seem. So he went on searching into her soul. When he began to speak of the books which he had lent her, without commenting on her refusal to see him the morning he called, she made a mild protest. "Pray never lend me any more of the same kind!" she implored. "Why not?" "They puzzle me and make me ill.... I don't know how to describe it. You said they would help me to find myself ... but, on the contrary, they seem to estrange me from everything that I had always thought before was pure and holy." "Perhaps that is so," he replied, and his walking-stick danced; "perhaps this is the first step that I demand of you in the ascent to a higher life.... By-the-by, let me tell you a little story that comes in _a propos_ here. There were once two old zealous missionaries who were conscientiously fired with the desire to spread Christianity in Central Africa.... Such freaks are really quite superfluous, but they exist, and we have to put up with them. In order to render their work of conversion the more solemn and convincing, they took with them a small portable organ. They dragged it, sweating, hundreds of miles, through deadly tropical heat into the heart of the interior, where the poor naked savages resided, on whom they had designs. There they set up the organ and started their services, but no sooner had the poor naked savages heard the first notes than they took their cudgels and brained the two zealous missionaries, because of the evil spirits shut up in the musical-box. In the same manner life deals with us, my dear lady, when we try to play it on the good old organ of our exploded moral prejudices." Lilly felt powerless to cope with such an overmastering intellect. In silent submission she bowed her head. And as he now, without asking her consent, laid her hand in his arm, she dared not withdraw it. They passed grimy factory walls, the dreary blackness of which was here and there illumined by the milky blue light of a lamp-post, scaffoldings stretched skeleton arms against the lurid cloudy sky, and now and then they heard the bells of the electric tramcars as they ran along parallel routes. "Where are we going?" she asked nervously. "We are avoiding human society," he answered. "And if I were to take advantage of the present situation, I should profit by your feeling lost and in need of my protection. But I am not a designing nature. In all that concerns the emotions I am a mere babe.... I simply take what heaven lets fall. Are not you constituted in the same way?" "No, I am too stolid and heavy," she said, ready to open her heart to him. "I think over things ever so much." "It depends what you think," he said gaily.