‘Hell is nothing more than the dominion of passion that we establish over our lives--of passion and all the hellish torments that passion engenders. We make our own hells by dwelling obstinately in the world of false desire. If we felt the only true desire, the desire of those things that are real, then there would at once be no more pain, and our state would be heaven. Desire is hell. And that hell we build and stoke and kindle for ourselves--go on kindling from life to life, in our fancy that the fire we endure contains the ultimate pleasure our souls can taste. It is no capricious Personality above that sends us anguish and misery. Everything we suffer follows automatically from some action of our own in this or some bygone phase that our marred memories can no longer recall. Here in the West you do not understand how this can be, though in your heart of hearts you know that it is. But in the older, wiser East men have learned to train their recollection until it is as easy to recall the sorrows of a bygone life as those of yesterday or the day before; for time is a thing that has no real existence in the infinite life of the soul. You, because of that old tie, knew the woman, and loved her and lost her. Because of that fire of false desire that you had fed in yourself for so many existences, you suffered anew the hell of your own making--the hell of loss and loneliness. But kill such false desires, and you kill the false miseries of this life that men think real. You stand at a point where you might strike upwards towards the heaven of peace; the curse of your love had nearly wrought out its completion, and passed away. But by nourishing as you do the fever of longing for the dead, you are binding yourself anew with the chains that were beginning to weaken and drop.’ ‘I don’t want to hear all this,’ replied Kingston impatiently. ‘If you know so much, tell me when and where I shall be able to find what I have lost. Shall I find it in this life? Shall I know it when I have found it? Remember how it passed away from me. You seem to understand all that happened, so tell me whether the change will affect our knowledge of each other.’