terest had returned. Her eyes were flatteries. He desired to be
amusing, to cover the eager child face beside him with a caress of
words.

"I don't think," she answered. "Do people ever think? I always imagine
that people have ideas that they look at and that the ideas never move
around."

"Yes," he agreed, "moving ideas around is what you might call thinking.
And people don't do that. They think only of destinations and for
purposes of forgetting something--drugging themselves to uncomfortable
facts. I fancy, however, I'm wrong. It's only after telling a number of
lies that one gets an idea of what might be true. Thus it occurs to me
now that I can't conceive of an intelligent person thinking in silence.
Intelligence is a faculty which enables people to boast. And it's
difficult boasting in silence. And inasmuch as it's necessary to be
intelligent to think, why, that sort of settles it. Ergo, people never
think. Do you mind my chatter?"

"Please ..."

A perfect applause this time. Her sincerity appealed to him as an
exquisite mannerism. She said "Please" as if she were breathless.

"You're an entertaining listener," he smiled. "And very clever. Because
it's ordinarily rather difficult to flatter me. I'm immensely delighted
with your silence, whereas ..." Dorn stumbled. He felt his speech was
degenerating into a compliment.

"Because you tell me things I've known," the girl spoke.

"Yet I tell you nothing."

He stared for an instant at the people in the street. "Nothing" was a
word his thought tripped on. He was used to mumbling it to himself as he
walked alone in streets. And at his desk it often came to him and
repeated itself. Now his thought murmured, "Nothing, nothing," and a
sadness drew itself into his heart. He laughed with a sense of treating
himself to a theatricalism.

"We haven't talked about God," he announced.

"God is one of my beliefs."

She was an idiot for frowning.

"I dislike to think of man as the product of evolution. It throws an
onus on the whole of nature. Whereas with a God to blame the thing is
simple."

She nodded, which was doubly idiotic, inasmuch as there was nothing to
nod to. He went on:

"Life is too short for brevities--for details. I save time by thinking,
if you can call it thinking, _en masse_--in generalities. For instance,
I think of people frequently but always as a species. I wonder about
them. My wonder is concerned chiefly with the manner in which they
adju