"That," replied "N. H.," "I know and understand. She builds the best form she can."
"And once the form is built," agreed the other, "and Nature's aim fulfilled, this kind of love usually fades out and dies. It is a physical thing entirely, like the two atoms we read about together a few days ago which rush together automatically to produce a third thing." He lowered his voice suddenly. "There was a great teacher once," he went on, "who told us that we should love everybody, everybody, and that in the real life there was no marriage, as we call it, nor giving in marriage."
It seemed that, as he said the words, the darkness lifted, and a faint perfume of flowers floated through the air.
"N. H." made no comment or reply. He sat still, listening.
"I love her," he whispered suddenly. "I love her in that way—because I want everybody else to love her too—as I do, and as you do. But I do not want her for myself alone. Do you? You do not, of course. I feel you are as I am. You are happy that I love her."
"There is morality," said Fillery presently in a low voice, glad at that moment of the darkness. "There is what we call morality."
"Tell me, dear Fillery, what that is. Is it bigger than your 'love'?"
Dr. Fillery explained briefly, while his companion listened intently, making no comment. It was evidently as strange and new to him as human love. "We have invented it," he added at the end, "to protect ourselves, our mothers, our families, our children. It is, you see, a set of rules devised for the welfare of the Race. For though a few among us do not need such rules, the majority do. It is, in a word, the acknowledgment of the rights of others."
"It had to be invented!" exclaimed "N. H.," with a sigh that seemed to trouble the darkness as with the sadness of something he could scarcely believe. "And these rules are needed still! Is the Race at that stage only? It does not move, then?"
Into the atmosphere, as the low-spoken words were audible, stole again that mysterious sense of the insignificance of earth and all its manifold activities, human and otherwise, and with it, too, a remarkable breath of some larger reality, starry-bright, that lay shining just beyond all known horizons. Fillery shivered in spite of himself. It seemed to him for an instant that the great figure looming opposite through the darkness extended, spread, gathering into its increased proportions the sky, the trees, the darkened space outside; that it no longer sat there quite alone. He recalled his colleague's startling admission—the touch of panic terror.