She shuddered.
"They couldn't be! We all fail somewhere."
This was true enough, and I offered no comment.
"I feel,"—she went on, hesitatingly—"that you are leaving us for some undiscovered country—and that you will reach some plane of thought and action to which we shall never rise. I don't think I am sorry for this. I am not one of those who want to rise. I should be perfectly content to live a few years in a moderate state of happiness and then drop into oblivion—and I think most people are like me."
"Very unambitious!" I said, smiling.
"Yes—I daresay it is—but one gets tired of it all. Tired of things and people—at least I do. Now that man Santoris—"
Despite myself, I felt the warm blood flushing my cheeks.
"Yes? What of him?" I queried, lightly.
"Well, I can understand that HE has always been alive!" and she turned her eyes upon me with an expression of positive dread—"Immensely, actively, perpetually alive! He seems to hold some mastery over the very air! I am afraid of him—terribly afraid! It is a relief to me to know that he and his strange yacht have gone!"
"But, Catherine,"—I ventured to say—"the yacht was not really 'strange,'—it was only moved by a different application of electricity from that which the world at present knows. You would not call it 'strange' if the discovery made by Mr. Santoris were generally adopted?"