"Ah!" cried the Countess Angela, her eyes beaming with pleasure, "let us try the experiment now. Where is there a glass? Yes, one of the pier-glasses. Come."
Countess Theudelinde was also excited. She stood up, and went with the others to the pier-glass.
"Write one of the letters of the alphabet," said Angela, and watched Ivan attentively. She was curious to see the letter he would choose. If he were vain, as very likely he was, he would write his own initial "I"; if a toady and flatterer, like most of the people round her aunt, he would choose "T," as the countess's initial; and if he were a silly fool, like so many other men, he would write "A." In either of these cases he would have seen on the beauty's face a scornful smile.
Ivan took the piece of coal, and with the point wrote on the glass the letter "X." Both ladies expressed their astonishment at seeing the coal write, and Countess Theudelinde assured Ivan it should be preserved carefully with her other jewels.
Countess Angela stood so near Ivan that the folds of her dress touched him.
"I believe," she said, slowly, "every word you told us. I beg of you do not tell me that all your romantic descriptions were but the necessary clothing of a dry scientific subject, meant to make it palatable to your silly, ignorant audience, and to raise in their minds a wish to seek further, so that they might in so seeking acquire a taste for knowledge. I do not want to seek, I believe implicitly all you said; but of this world of wonder and miracles I would know more. How far does it go? What more do you see, for the magician must know everything?"
The young countess looked into Ivan's eyes as she spoke with a strange magnetic power impossible to resist. Such a look as this had often dazzled men's brains.
"You said, also," continued Angela, "how fiery and strong are those who live in this magnetic kingdom, but that they have no credit for the virtues they possess; it is due to the working of magnetism. I believe this also. Magnetism has, however, two poles, the north and the south pole. I have read that the opposite poles are drawn to one another, and the homogeneous drift asunder. If, therefore, in the magnetic kingdom hearts are drawn to one another, seek one another, love one another, which is an immutable fact, so also is it an immutable fact that there must be human beings who hate one another with an undying, a deadly hatred, and that such hatred is no sin. Am I not right?"
Ivan felt that he was driven into a corner; he understood the drift of the countess's question. Here his knowledge of natural philosophy came to his assistance.
"It is true," he said, "that so far as life upon the earth is in question, there must also exist antipathies and sympathies. You have studied magnetism, you have read of the poles, therefore you must know that there exists an equator, or line, which is neither north nor south. This is the magnetic equator, that neither draws the magnet nor repulses it, and here there is perfect peace. Just such an equator is found in every human heart, and however a man may be carried away by the passions of love or hatred, his line remains unchangeable, and those who dwell there dwell in peace."