“Then?—Why, then I shouldn’t mind!” she said. “I can swim.”
“You would not be afraid?”
She met his eyes bravely.
“No—I should not be afraid!”
“Upon my word, I believe you! You’re a plucky woman! But then you’ve nothing to lose by your daring, having lost all—so you told me. What do you mean by having lost all?”
“I mean just what I say,” she replied quietly. “Father, mother, home, lover, youth, beauty and hope! Isn’t that enough to lose?”
And, as she spoke, she gazed almost unseeingly at the wonderful Wheel as it whirled round and round, glittering with a thousand colours which were reflected in the dark mirror of the water below it. The sun was sinking, and the light through the over-arching glass dome was softer, and with each minute became more subdued,—and she noted with keen interest that the revolution of the wheel was less rapid and dizzying to the eye.
“Enough to lose—yes!” said Dimitrius. “But the loss is quite common. Most of us, as we get on in life, lose father and mother, home, and even lover!—but that we should lose youth, beauty and hope is quite our own affair! We ought to know better!” She looked at him in surprise.
“How should we know better?” she asked. “Age must come,—and with age the wrinkling and spoiling of all beautiful faces, to say nothing of the aches and pains and ailments common to a general break-up of the body-cells. We cannot defy the law of Nature.”
“That is precisely what we are always doing!” said Dimitrius. “And that is why we make such trouble for ourselves. We not only defy the law of Nature in a bodily sense by over-eating, over-drinking and over-breeding, but we ignore it altogether in a spiritual sense. We forget,—and wilfully forget, that the body is only the outward manifestation of a Soul-creature, not the Soul-creature itself. So we starve the Light and feed the Shadow, and then foolishly wonder that, with the perishing Light, the Shadow is absorbed in darkness.”