stly, "I suppose I'm a dreadful egotist, but more
and more I'm feeling the real me isn't a true child of this world! I
love this world--and I hate it. I don't know whether I love it most or
hate it most. I bless it and damn it every day of my life--in the same
breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most--hate it for its cold
dullness of head and heart! Why can't we care more to make it worth
living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What's the matter with us?
Why are we what we are? Half angels--and half pigs or goats or
saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large!
And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels--while they're
living, anyway! Dreamers--mad visionaries--social rebels--outcasts!
Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them--ages of
to-be-wasted time enough--when they're dead!" She paused, still holding
my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and
was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine.

"There--that's over. Saying things like that doesn't help us a bit;
it's--silly.... And half the idealists _are_ mad, no doubt, and have
plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I've simply coils and coils of
unregenerate serpent in me--and worse. Oh, Ambo dear--but I've a dream
in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it
doesn't--it won't. I'm afraid it never will--here. Will it _there_,
Ambo? Is there a _there_?... Have we got all of Sister that clean fire
couldn't take, shut up in that tiny vase?"

"We can hope not, at least," I replied.

"Hope isn't enough," said Susan. "Why don't you say you know we
haven't! I know we haven't. I do know it. It's the only thing
I--_know_!"

A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray
before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward.

"Anything more, sir?" he murmured.

"A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again,
with a slight impatient shake of the head.

I ordered a cigar and a _fine champagne_. The waiter, still nervously
fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some
intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us
with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he
would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were
out of place.

"No; I can't go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he'll be
hurt--he won't be able to se