“Neither with fire nor sword.”
“You know I wouldn’t try,” he said.
“If you are going to treat me facetiously I will not pursue the subject,” she declared, the red blood mantling in her sallow cheek.
“I am quite serious,” he said, deprecatingly.
“A woman who can live without eating cannot die,” pursued the Countess, mollified. “I was an invalid, and in my convalescence gradually worked my way to the Truth, and by means of it I have lived fourteen weeks without food. I worked down from five ounces a day to nothing, dropping an ounce a day. And I didn’t lose a pound of flesh.”
“I have fasted, too,” he said, grimly. “But I never found any Truth through it.” He reflected bitterly on the anxious competition of people to give him food, now that he had plenty of his own. Was this the London which he had tramped for work, famished and rebellious?
“You must be patient,” she answered, earnestly. “You must kill the man in you; then you will have got rid of the mortal part. You will be pure spirit, part of God. Existence is only God’s thoughts; everything good is a God-idea, everything evil a man-idea. Jesus was the first discoverer of the Truth, and only the man-idea in Him was crucified, the mortal part. Only the evil part of us is mortal. I have suppressed the man-idea in myself, therefore I cannot die.”
“But do you mean to say you will always live on?”
“Yes, though not necessarily on earth.”
“But what will happen—will you disappear?”