Her dream, then, was in truth an unthinkable reality: faith, as designed, a pregnant hoax.

Words were worse than useless now, and the body as helpless; thus Yodogima only stared, the harder: with one furtive glance Katsutoya read her innermost thoughts, and flushing to the full bent his knee with partings still baser:

“Trust me, Yodogima: henceforth I am Harunaga.”

Yodogima did not attempt to answer her traducer, who departed as he had entered, professing the bestowal, only, of mercies latent underneath the sackcloth and of the beadroll. She lay submerged now; overweighted with a fantasy as far beneath the earth she abode as fancy had heretofore carried her above it. Darkness came on, tremors marked some hard internal disturbance, while yawning caverns fumed and spat fiery bursts and sulphurous clouds from the mountain away. The infernal possessed her. A huge dragon, half within, half without, at the summit, coiling and straightening, lifting and lowering, seeking and searching, here and there, all around, to the horizon, at last found her out, and mounting its slender neck, with no hold to retain her balance, the monster, rising with her, curved easily round and, retracing its slimy part, disappeared into the uttermost depths of hades itself.

And there Ono Harunaga sweat and forked at building the fires. Great heaps of humans replenished the fuel bins. These Yodogima scanned with eagerness: many faces seemed familiar, but always before she could come close enough to determine certainly who the victim was, Harunaga had snatched away and pitched him into the flames beyond her reach or discernment. Which eager haste seemed quite unreasonable to her, but upon questioning him he answered resolutely as of old:

“Have faith in—”

Yodogima did not exactly catch the last word in his reply, but she could not believe it “Christ” or “Buddha” or “Confucius,” or any like name that she knew, because the furnace fender were himself a reverend man. No Shinto patron had been named; these were gods: the antithesis of Saviors, hence in fact and not on trust.

Once she thought she saw her father, but upon closer scrutiny discerned this victim’s plight to be in consequence of the vain ambitions of three unfaithful daughters, hence knew that she must have mistaken him. This almost inexcusable blunder shocked her severely, and to avoid any further unpleasantness of that sort Yodogima determined, as she were there, to do as others did; disguise her own true self, and rely wholly upon deception to carry her forward thence in the quest of all things hellish. Therefore she began ignoring the individual, and continued considering altogether the classes; and as there appeared to be only one such there, she hit upon the plan of segregating Harunaga’s vast unrealized mass of strident humans by considering more their color. And here, too, distinguishment proved difficult, though there appeared to be, distinctly, some awful difference in the flame if white fuel were added, or the reverse. The former flared more fiercely, burned the less willingly, and their screams—

Rising to her feet and looking round at the barren walls yet enclosing her, Yodogima realized for the first time that what we think we see is but the shadow of an energy stupidly awaiting over there the magic wand here to unfold.

Intelligence had wrought a true womanhood.