“Oh, no! I am very well indeed!” she replied at once. “I can truthfully assure you I never felt better. Your strange ‘fire-drop’ never gives me any uncanny ‘sensations’ now--I don’t mind it at all. It seems to fill me with a sort of brightness and buoyancy. But I have no actual ‘feeling’ about it--neither pleasure nor pain. That’s rather odd, isn’t it?” They were at the entrance door of the hotel, and stood on the steps before going in. The moonlight fell slantwise on Diana’s face and showed it wonderfully fair and calm, like that of a sculptured angel in some niche of a cathedral. “Yes--perhaps it is odd,” he answered. “As I have already told you, I am not cognisant of the possible action of the commingled elements I have distilled,--I can only test them and watch their effect upon _you_, in order to gain the necessary knowledge. But that you have no ‘feeling’ seems to me an exaggerated statement,--for instance, you must have ‘felt’ a good deal of pleasure in your skating to-night?” “Not the least in the world!” and the smile she gave him was as chill as a moonbeam on snow. “I skated on the ice with the same volition as a bubble floats along the air,--as unconscious as the bubble--and as indifferent! The bubble does not care when it breaks--nor do I! Good-night!” She pushed open the swing door of the hotel and passed in. He remained outside in the moonlight, vexed with himself and her, though he could not have told why. He lit a cigar and strolled slowly backwards and forwards in the front of the hotel, trying to soothe his inward irritation by smoking, but the effect was rather futile. “She is wonderfully pretty and attractive now,” he mused. “If all succeeds she will be beautiful. And what then? I wonder! With every process of age stopped and reversed, and with all the stimulating forces of creative regeneration working in every cell of her body it is impossible to tell how she may develop--and yet--her mentality may remain the same! This is easily accounted for, because all one’s experiences of life from childhood make permanent impressions on the brain and stay there. Like the negatives stored in a photographer’s dark room one cannot alter them. And the puzzle to me is, how will her mentality ‘carry’ with her new personality? Will she know how to hold the balance between them? I can see already that men are quite likely to lose their heads about her--but what does that matter! It is not the first time they have maddened themselves for women who are set beyond the pale of mere sex.” He looked up at the still sky,--the frostily sparkling stars,--the snowy peaks of the mountains and the bright moon. “Thank God I have never loved any woman save my mother!” he said. “For so I have been spared both idleness and worry! To lose one’s time and peace because a woman smiles or frowns is to prove one’s self a fool or a madman!”