as I can; as little painful as explanations _can_ make it. I can't feel
as you feel, but I can see, rather dimly, what it is that hurts you. And
so ... I want to; I really want to."

"But you won't do the one thing," I returned hopelessly to the charge.

"I cannot," she answered, "it must be like that; there isn't any way.
You are so tied down to these little things. Don't you see that de
Mersch, and--and all these people--don't really count? They aren't
anything at all in the scheme of things. I think that, even for you,
they aren't worth bothering about. They're only accidents; the accidents
that--"

"That what?" I asked, although I began to see dimly what she meant.

"That lead in the inevitable," she answered. "Don't you see? Don't you
understand? We _are_ the inevitable ... and you can't keep us back. We
have to come and you, you will only hurt yourself, by resisting." A
sense that this was the truth, the only truth, beset me. It was for the
moment impossible to think of anything else--of anything else in the
world. "You must accept us and all that we mean, you must stand back;
sooner or later. Look even all round you, and you will understand
better. You are in the house of a type--a type that became impossible.
Oh, centuries ago. And that type too, tried very hard to keep back the
inevitable; not only because itself went under, but because everything
that it stood for went under. And it had to suffer--heartache ... that
sort of suffering. Isn't it so?"

I did not answer; the illustration was too abominably just. It was just
that. There were even now all these people--these Legitimists--sneering
ineffectually; shutting themselves away from the light in their mournful
houses and suffering horribly because everything that they stood for had
gone under.

"But even if I believe you," I said, "the thing is too horrible, and
your tools are too mean; that man who has just gone out and--and
Callan--are they the weapons of the inevitable? After all, the
Revolution ..." I was striving to get back to tangible ideas--ideas that
one could name and date and label ... "the Revolution was noble in
essence and made for good. But all this of yours is too vile and too
petty. You are bribing, or something worse, that man to betray his
master. And that you call helping on the inevitable...."

"They used to say just that of the Revolution. That wasn't nice of its
tools. Don't you see? They were the people that went under.... They