Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/41

Rh "This isn't life," he answered. "People who shut themselves up in an artificial park are fugitives from life. Life begins at the park gates with the natural countryside, and the squalid peasantry, and the sordid farmers, and the Jew money-lenders, and the uncertain crops."

"Oh, it’s all life," insisted she, "the park and the countryside, and the virgin forest and the deep sea, with all things in them. It’s all life. I’m alive, and I daresay you are. You would exclude from life all that is nice in life, and then say of the remainder, that only is life. You’re not logical."

"Heaven forbid," he murmured devoutly. "I’m sure you’re not either. Only stupid people are logical."

She laughed lightly. "My poor carp little dream to what far paradoxes they have led," she mused, looking into the water, which was now quite tranquil. "They have sailed away to their mysterious affairs among the lily-roots. I should like to be a carp for a few minutes, to see what it is like in those cool, dark places under the water. I am sure there are all sorts of strange things and treasures. Do you believe there are really water-maidens, like Undine?"

"Not nowadays," he informed her, with the confident fluency of one who knew. "There used to be; but, like so many other charming things, they disappeared with the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the rise of the Lutheran heresy. Their prophetic souls"

"Oh, but they had no souls, you remember," she corrected him.

"I beg your pardon; that was the belief that prevailed among their mortal contemporaries, but it has since been ascertained that they had souls, and very good ones. Their prophetic souls warned them what a dreary, dried-up planet the earth was destined to Rh