"Three years—why, it's an eternity, or a minute, as you are obliged to live it. In penal servitude it is centuries, in the Appian Way of pleasure it is a sunrise moment. Actual time has nothing to do with the clock."
She looked up to the little gold-lacquered clock on the mantel-piece. "See, it is going to strike," she said. As she spoke, the little silver hammer softly struck. "That is the clock-time, but what time is it really—for you, for instance?"
"In Elysium there is no time," he murmured with a gallantry so intentionally obvious and artificial that her pulses beat with anger.
"It is wonderful, then, how you managed the dinner-hour so exactly. You did not miss it by a fraction."
"It is only when you enter Elysium that there is no time. It was eight o'clock when I arrived—by the world's time. Since then I have been dead to time—and the world."
"You do not suggest that you are in heaven?" she asked, ironically.
"Nothing so extreme as that. All extremes are violent."
"Ah, the middle place—then you are in purgatory?"
"But what should you be doing in purgatory? Or have you only come with a drop of water to cool the tongue of Dives?" His voice trailed along so coolly that it incensed her further.
"Certainly Dives' tongue is blistering," she said with great effort to still the raging tumult within her. "Yet I would not cool it if I could."