‘You seem wonderfully taken with the sophist of Hippo,’ said Hypatia impatiently; ‘and forget, perhaps, that his opinions, especially when, as you confess, they are utterly inconsistent with themselves, are not quite as important to me as they seem to have become to you.’
‘Whether he be consistent or not about marriage,’ said Raphael, somewhat proudly, ‘I care little. I went to him to tell me, not about the relation of the sexes, on which point I am probably as good a judge as he—but about God and on that subject he told me enough to bring me back to Alexandria, that I might undo, if possible, somewhat of the wrong which I have done to Hypatia.’
‘What wrong have you done me?.... You are silent? Be sure, at least, that whatsoever it may be, you will not wipe it out by trying to make a proselyte of me!’
‘Be not too sure of that. I have found too great a treasure not to wish to share it with Theon’s daughter.’
‘A treasure?’ said she, half scornfully.
‘Yes, indeed. You recollect my last words, when we parted there below a few months ago?’
Hypatia was silent. One terrible possibility at which he had hinted flashed across her memory for the first time since;.... but she spurned proudly from her the heaven-sent warning.
‘I told you that, like Diogenes, I went forth to seek a man. Did I not promise you, that when I had found one you should be the first to hear of him? And I have found a man.’
Hypatia waved her beautiful hand. ‘I know whom you would say.... that crucified one. Be it so. I want not a man, but a god.’
‘What sort of a god, Hypatia? A god made up of our own intellectual notions, or rather of negations of them—of infinity and eternity, and invisibility, and impassibility—and why not of immortality, too, Hypatia? For I recollect we used to agree that it was a carnal degrading of the Supreme One to predicate of Him so merely human a thing as virtue.’