"Now you see a very commonplace mortal, without cloven feet, even without gloves, in which he could conceal his satanic claws, and who only differs from other people in venturing, under the pressure of necessity, to enter this noble society in the modest garb of a traveler on a pedestrian tour."
"Whether you seem so commonplace to me," replied the beautiful blonde, shaking back her curls and casting a laughing glance at her husband, "is a doubtful question, which we'll not discuss here. Enough, you have completely undeceived me."
"And what idea had you formed of a philosopher, Princess?"
"I had always imagined an elderly, yellow, thin man, with piercing black eyes and scornfully compressed lips--something after the style of Voltaire--a man in whose presence a cold shudder runs through one's frame, and who rubs his hands with a gloomy laugh, partly from malicious pleasure that he has deprived so many good, simple people of the salvation of their souls, and partly because he himself is freezing."
"I can assure you, Your Highness, that I find both the temperature of this drawing room and the world outside perfectly comfortable."
"That's just what I perceived at once, and what greatly surprised me. Perhaps, however, you're only a good actor, or don't you really shiver?"
"So far as I'm aware," replied Edwin smiling, "philosophers have just as warm red blood as other mammiferous animals. What made you suppose, Madame, that we belonged to the amphibious?
"Your relationship to the serpent, whose evil business you continue. Or do you do something besides persuading the poor children of God, that they may eat of the tree of knowledge, although you know the punishment that will follow--the loss of Paradise."
"And are you so certain, that our first parents felt warmer and happier and more comfortable in the perpetual sunlight, than when they ate their bread in the sweat of their brow? However this question is difficult to decide and fortunately no longer comes under consideration. We're not in Eden now, we must seek some compensation for the sunny ignorance we've lost, and so far as my experience goes, Your Highness, among the various means of keeping warm, the possession of a genuine, honest philosophy is not the worst."
"What? You assert that reason can warm? A wisdom in which the heart has no share--"