FOR now had come to them, traveling back from Antan, the brown man. This brown man came, he said, to summon Maya to her appointed task of transforming yet other men into domestic animals.
“—For women,” he said, also, “have always their fond task and their beneficent labor. Here, I repeat, the woman’s task is ended. But yonder many men go untamed and unbroken to the sane ways of compromise.”
Then Maya a bit absent-mindedly assented, as she put away those spectacles of hers for future use, that, in point of fact, she supposed she had done everything that was actually necessary in Gerald’s case, although nobody ever would really know what a trial he had been to her.
And Gerald for one instant looked at his wife. He found in his wife’s face that which it is the doom of most husbands to find there at one time or another. And it caused Gerald to laugh a little.
“Nevertheless,” Gerald said, quietly, “I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. I am Lord of the Third Truth, in this world which knows of only two truths and of the compromises which they beget.”
The brown man greeted that with a thin smile. “You have been long expected. Oh, very long have scepticism and despair, with somewhat varying voices, invoked your name, saying, ‘Who will overthrow the Master Philologist!’ ”
“Well, and now,” said Gerald, with the outline of a swagger, for he was getting himself more in hand, “now that prophecy is about to be fulfilled, for I am Hoo, and none other.”
“But, really, friend, I do not see how you can be an interrogative pronoun.”
“To a god, and more particularly to a Dirghic god, all incarnations are possible. There is no reason whatever why I should not be an interrogative pronoun. It is merely a matter of divine election.”
And the brown man civilly inclined his grave brown head, as he remarked: