"I think it's a perfectly horrible idea" stated Jan complacently. "It isn't--I love it and it's true ... you go on and on and on, filling space." "Then space is solid." "It is solid. People who talk of empty space don't think ... space is more solid than a wall ... yes ... more solid than a diamond--girls, I'm sure." "Space is full of glorious stars...." "Yes; I know but that's such a tiny bit of it...." "Millions and trillions of miles." "Those are only words. Everything is words." "Well you _must_ use words." "You ought not to think in words. I mean--you can think in your brain by imagining yourself going on and on through it, endless space." "You can't grasp space with your mind." "You don't GRASP it. You go through it." "I see what you mean. To me it is a fearful idea. Like eternal punishment." "There's no such thing as eternal punishment. The idea is too silly. It makes God a failure and a fool. It's a man's idea. The men who take the hearthrug. Sitting on a throne judging everybody and passing sentence is a thing a man would do." "But humanity is wicked." "Then God is. You can't separate God and humanity and that includes women who don't really believe any of those things." "_But._ Look at the churches. Look at women and the parsons." "Women like ritual and things and they like parsons, _some_ parsons, because they are like women, penetrable to light, as Wilberforce said the other day, and understand women better than most men do." "Miriam, are you a pantheist?" "The earth the sea and the sky "The sun the moon and the stars "Are not these, oh soul, "That's the Higher Pantheism." "Nearer is he than breathing, closer than hands and feet. It doesn't matter what you call it." "If you don't accept eternal punishment there can't be eternal happiness." "Oh punishment, happiness; tweedledum, tweedledee." "Well--look here, there's remorse. That's deathless. It must be. If you feel remorseful about anything the feeling must last as long as you remember the thing." "Remorse is real enough. I know what you mean. But it may be short-sightedness. Not seeing all round a thing. Is that Tomlinson? Or it may be cleansing you. If it were _complete_ Mag it would _kill_ you outright. I can believe that. I can believe in annihilation. I am prepared for it. I can't think why it doesn't happen to me. That's just it." "I should like to be annihilated." "Shut up von Bohlen; you wouldn't. But look here Miriam child, do you mean to say you think that as long as there is something that keeps on and on, fighting its way on in spite of everything one has, well, a right to exist?" "Well, that may be the survival of the fittest which doesn't mean the ethically fittest as Huxley had to admit. We kill the ethically fittest at present. We killed Christ. They go to Heaven. All of us who survive have things to learn down here in hell. Perhaps this is hell. There seems something, ahead."