‘Tell Leda?’

‘Perhaps....  I was going to say ... you might come fishing with me....’

‘O luck!’ she went softly.

I was pierced by a sense of my base cowardice, my incredible weakness:  but I could not at all help it.

I took the flowers, and we went down to the south side, where my boat lay; I threw out some of the fish from the well; arranged the tackle, and then the stern cushions for her; got up the sails; and out we went, she steering, I in the bows, with every possible inch of space between us, receiving delicious intermittent whiffs from her of ambergris, frangipane, or some blending of perfumes, the morning being bright and hot, with very little breeze on the water, which looked mottled, like colourless water imperfectly mixed with indigo-wash, we making little headway; so it was some time before I moved nearer her to get the par for fixing on the three-triangle flight, for I was going to trail for salmon or large lake-trout; and during all that time we spoke not a word together.

Afterwards I said: 

’Who told you that flowers are proper to birthdays? or that birthdays are of any importance?’

‘I suppose that nothing can happen so important as birth,’ says she:  ’and perfumes must be ploper to birth, because the wise men blought spices to the young Jesus.’

This naivete was the cause of my immediate recovery:  for to laugh is to be saved:  and I laughed right out, saying: 

’But you read the Bible too much! all your notions are biblical.  You should read the quite modern books.’

‘I have tlied,’ says she:  ’but I cannot lead them long, nor often.  The whole world seems to have got so collupted.  It makes me shudder.’

‘Ah, well now, you see, you quite come round to my point of view,’ said I.

‘Yes, and no,’ says she:  ’they had got so spoiled, that is all.  Everlybody seems to have become quite dull-witted—­the plainest tluths they could not see.  I can imagine that those faculties which aided them in their stlain to become lich themselves, and make the lest more poor, must have been gleatly sharpened, while all the other faculties withered:  as I can imagine a person with one eye seeing double thlough it, and quite blind on the other side.’

‘Ah,’ said I, ’I do not think they even wanted to see on the other side.  There were some few tolerably good and clear-sighted ones among them, you know:  and these all agreed in pointing out how, by changing one or two of their old man-in-the-moon Bedlam arrangements, they could greatly better themselves:  but they heard with listless ears:  I don’t know that they ever made any considerable effort.  For they had become more or less unconscious of their misery, so miserable were they:  like the man in Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon,” who, when his deliverers came, was quiet indifferent, for he says: 

  “It was at length the same to me
  Fettered or fetterless to be: 
    I had learned to love Despair."’