"On what grounds?"
"On grounds I have set forth to you twenty times, Helen, dear," answered George a little impatiently. "I am not inclined to talk about them now.—I can no more believe in a god than in a dragon."
"And yet a dragon was believable to the poets that made our old ballads; and now geology reveals that some-such creatures did at one time actually exist."
"Ah! you turn the tables on me there, Helen! I confess my parallel a false one."
"A truer one than you think, perhaps," said Helen. "That a thing should seem absurd to one man, or to a thousand men, will not make it absurd in its own nature; and men as good and as clever as you, George, have in all ages believed in a God. Only their notion of God may have been different from yours. Perhaps their notion was a believable one, while yours is not."
"By Jove, Helen! you've got on with your logic. I feel quite flattered! So far as I am aware you have had no tutor in that branch but myself! You'll soon be too much for your master, by Jove!"
Like the pied piper, Helen smiled a little smile. But she said seriously,
"Well, George, all I have to suggest is—What if, after all your inability to believe it, things should at last prove, even to your— satisfaction, shall I say?—that there IS a God?"
"Don't trouble yourself a bit about it, Helen," returned George, whose mind was full of something else, to introduce which he was anxiously, and heedlessly, clearing the way: "I am prepared to take my chance, and all I care about is whether you will take your chance with me. Helen, I love you with my whole soul."
"Oh! you have a soul, then, George? I thought you hadn't!"