or to a close and merciless scrutiny.

"So you," she said at last, "were the fairy godfather. You were the
man who trusted a nameless boy with five hundred pounds, because his
vaporings amused you. You pushed him out into the world, you bade him
go and seek his fortune."

"I was that infernal fool!" Rochester muttered.

The woman nodded.

"Yes, a fool!" she said. "No one but a fool would do such a thing. And
yet great things have come of it."

Rochester shrugged his shoulders. He was not prepared to admit that
Bertrand Saton was in any sense great.

"My adopted son," she continued, "is very wonderful. Egypt had its
soothsayers thousands of years ago. This century, too, may have its
prophet. Bertrand gains power every day. He is beginning to
understand."

"You, too," Rochester asked politely, "are perhaps a student of the
occult?"

"Whatever I am," she answered scornfully, "I am not one of those who
because their two feet are planted upon the earth, and their head
reaches six feet towards the sky, are prepared to declare that there
is no universe save the earth upon which they stand, no sky save the
sky toward which they look--nothing in life which their eyes will not
show them, or which their hands may not touch."

Rochester smiled faintly.

"Materialism is an easy faith and a safe one," he said. "Imagination
is very distorting."

"For you who feel like that," she answered, "the way through life is
simple enough. We others can only pity."

"Comtesse," Rochester said, "such an attitude is perfectly reasonable.
It is only when you attempt to convert that we are obliged to fall
back upon our readiest weapons."

"You are one of those," she said, looking at him keenly, "who do not
wish to understand more than you understand at present, who have no
desire to gain the knowledge of hidden things."

"You are right, Comtesse," Rochester answered, with a smile. "I am one
of those pig-headed individuals."

"It is the Saxon race," she muttered, "who have kept back the progress
of the world for centuries."

"We have kept it backward, perhaps," he answered, "but wholesome."

"You think always of your bodies," she said.

"They were entrusted to us, madam, to look after," he answered.

She smiled grimly.

"You are not such a fool," she said, "as my adopted son would have me
believe. You have spared me at least that hideous Latin quotation
which has done so much harm to your race."

"Out of respect to you," h