“You should see her. She is very beautiful after a certain style. You would like her too, for till she becomes too ill to go about she is as merry as a bird, and as light.”
“Can she retain that lightness even in hell?” I asked.
“Why, yes. She is very deeply in love with him, so that there is nothing particularly saintly in it. And beyond that it pays her to be agreeable to him, because then she gets her own way at the end.”
I laughed.
“You certainly bring it down to a very matter-of-fact level,” I remarked.
“Well, she was an arch-deceiver, but because she looked the other thing we were all taken in. However, she did not do much good with all her manœuvring, and I expected the next time she came down here she would have passed me by without a word.”
“What had you done?”
“Oh, nothing. But I was mistaken, she was no different from before. Since then she has come and gone; how much harm she does is not to be told, but, being a philosopher, I have come to take it quietly.”
“Has she a good influence on you all, then?”
“She has no influence on anyone except Vestasian—and not much on him. But the same applies to spirits as to mortals. No man should ever allow himself to be governed by a woman, not in the slightest. If so, she will drag him over the most perilous path he ever trod, whether to Heaven or Hell.”