'Well, then: we are an undefined company of people, who have grown into human relations with each other naturally, through one attractive force—love for human beings, regarding them as human beings only in virtue of the divine in them.'
'But you must have some rules,' I insisted.
'None whatever. They would cause us only trouble. We have nothing to take us from our work. Those that are most in earnest, draw most together; those that are on the outskirts have only to do nothing, and they are free of us. But we do sometimes ask people to help us—not with money.'
'But who are the we?'
'Why you, if you will do anything, and I and Miss St. John and twenty others—and a great many more I don't know, for every one is a centre to others. It is our work that binds us together.'
'Then when that stops you drop to pieces.'
'Yes, thank God. We shall then die. There will be no corporate body—which means a bodied body, or an unsouled body, left behind to simulate life, and corrupt, and work no end of disease. We go to ashes at once, and leave no corpse for a ghoul to inhabit and make a vampire of. When our spirit is dead, our body is vanished.'
'Then you won't last long.'
'Then we oughtn't to last long.'
'But the work of the world could not go on so.'