"Man has many thousands of years before him yet ere his little ball of earth gets too cold for him; the little speck in his brain may grow to the size of a pea, a cherry, a walnut, an egg, an orange! He will have in him the magnetic consciousness of the entire solar system, and hold the keys of time and space as long and as far as the sun shines for us all—and then there will be the beginning of everything. And all through that little episode in the street of those White Ursulines! And the seed of Barty and Leah will overflow to the uttermost ends of the earth, and finally blossom and bear fruit for ever and ever beyond the stars.
"What a beginning for a new order of things! what a getting up‑stairs! what an awakening! what an annunciation!
"Do you remember that knock at the door?
"'Il est dix heures, savez‑vous? Voulez‑vous votre café dans votre chambre?'
"She little knew, poor little Frau! humble little Finche Torfs, lowly Flemish virgin, who loved you as the moth loves the star; vilain mangeur de coeurs que vous êtes!
"Barty, I wish your wife to hear nothing of this till the child who once was your Martia shall have seen the light of day with eyes of its own; tell her that I have left you at last, but don't tell her why or how; tell her some day, years hence, if you think she will love me the better for it; not otherwise.
"When you wake, Barty, I shall still be inside you; say to me in your mezza voce all the kind things you can think of—such things as you would have said to your mother had she lived till now, and you were speeding her on a long and uncertain journey.
"How you would have loved your mother! She was most beautiful, and of the type so dear to you. Her skin was almost as white as Leah's, her eyes almost as black, her hair even blacker; like Leah, she was tall and slim and lithe and graceful. She might have been Leah's mother, too, for the likeness between them. How often you remind me of her when you laugh or sing, and when you're funny in French; those droll, quick gestures and quaint intonations, that ease and freedom and deftness as you move! And then you become English in a moment, and your big, burly, fair‑haired father has come back with his high voice, and his high spirits, and his frank blue eyes, like yours, so kind and brave and genial.
"And you, dear, what a baby you were—a very prince among babies; ah! if I can only be like that when I begin again!
"The people in the Tuileries garden used to turn round and stare and smile at you when Rosalie with the long blue streamers bore you along as proudly as if Louis Philippe were your grandfather and she the royal wet‑nurse; and later, after that hideous quarrel about nothing, and the fatal fight by the 'mare aux biches,' how the good fisher people of Le Pollet adored you! 'Un vrai petit St. Jean! il nous portera bonheur, bien sûr!'