“After all,” he said, “which of us does not feel himself eternal, exempt from the penalty of the race? You don’t believe that you will ever die, Winifred?”
“I know it,” she said.
“Yes, but you don’t believe it.”
“You think knowledge less real than belief? Perhaps it is. But I, at least, hope that some day I shall die. To live on here for ever would be like staying eternally at a party. After all, when one has danced, and supped, and flirted, and wondered at the gowns, and praised the flowers, and touched the hand of one’s hostess, and swung round in a final gallop, and said how much one has enjoyed it all—one wants to go home.”
“Does one?” Eustace said. “Home you call it!”
He shuddered.
“I call it what I want it to be, what I think it may be, what the poor and the weary and the fallen make it in their lonely thoughts. Let us, at least, hope that we travel towards the east, where the sun is.”
“You have strange fancies,” he said.
“I! Not so strange as yours.”
She looked at him in the eyes as she spoke. He wondered what that look meant. It seemed to him a menace.