She leaned back against a tree. Heyst faced her in the same attitude of leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other concerns of the earth. Suddenly, high above their heads the roof of leaves whispered at them tumultuously and then ceased.
“That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away,” she said. “Send me away? What for? Yes, what for?”
“You seem indignant,” he remarked listlessly.
“To these savages, too!” she pursued. “And you think I would have gone? You can do what you like with me—but not that, not that!”
Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest. Everything was so still now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to exhale silence into the shade.
“Why be indignant?” he remonstrated. “It has not happened. I gave up pleading with Wang. Here we are, repulsed! Not only without power to resist the evil, but unable to make terms for ourselves with the worthy envoys, the envoys extraordinary of the world we thought we had done with for years and years. And that's bad, Lena, very bad.”
“It's funny,” she said thoughtfully. “Bad? I suppose it is. I don't know that it is. But do you? Do you? You talk as if you didn't believe in it.”
She gazed at him earnestly.
“Do I? Ah! That's it. I don't know how to talk. I have managed to refine everything away. I've said to the Earth that bore me: 'I am I and you are a shadow.' And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost all belief in realities . . . Lena, give me your hand.”
She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.