again Don Juan imagines a retort. Elvire makes short work of his
poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a
mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "Whom in heaven's name is
he trying to take in?" He entreats music to take his part. "It alone can
pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and
truth. And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting
sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies--with those
vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. Elvire,
however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to
words."

The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "How
do we rise from falseness into truth?" "We do so after the fashion of
the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but
leaves the rest of his body under water--by the act of self-immersion in
the very element from which we wish to escape. Truth is to the aspiring
soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. But if the
swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more
completely than before. If the soul strives to escape from the grosser
atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. Her truthward
yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. Body and soul must
alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe,
for this element can alone sustain them. But through the act of plunging
we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have
brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper
confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to
submerge."

"Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp
at something which seems a soul. The piece of falsity slips through our
fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us
upwards into the realm of truth. This is precisely what Fifine has done.
Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms
of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse
is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "Childe
Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged
to humble itself before the ocean.

Elvire is still dissatisfied. The suspicious fact remains, that whatever
experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must
supply it. This he fr