He waved his hand upward, and lifted his eyes, as if following with them the flight that he described.
"It flew away!"
"Where did it go?" ejaculated Cuckoo.
Valentine seemed suddenly to become fully aware of the depth of her interest.
"Ah! even you are fascinated by my gospel, you who cannot understand it," he said. "But I cannot tell you where it went. I too have wondered."
He knit his brows rather moodily over this question of location. "I too have wondered. But I imagine that it died; that it ceased to be. Divorced from the body that was its home, degraded by dissatisfaction with itself, of what use could it be to any one? Even if it still continues to be, it is practically dead, for it can work neither harm nor good to any one, and the thing that cannot be good or evil, or turn others towards the one or the other, is dead. It is no more a will. It is no more an influence. It is a heart without a pulse in it; in fact, it is nothing."
A sort of joy had leapt into his face as he dwelt on this idea of nothingness, and he added:
"It is something like your soul, my lady of the feathers. Do you hear me?"
"Yes. I hear!"
"But the will that ousted it gained in power by that triumph. Totally self-satisfied, desirous of being only that which it is, having no enemy of yearning disappointment with itself in its camp, it can do what will never did before. It can lead captive the soul that was formerly the captive of the soul that it drove away to die. Like an enemy it has seized its opponent's camp, and the slave dwelling in that camp is now its slave forever."