and body.  He loved an ideal, revealed to him, as he thought, in the shape of the fair English girl; he worshipped his ideal through her, without a thought that he could be mistaken.  Happy man!  Perhaps he had a better chance of going through life without any cruel revelation of his mistake than falls to the lot of most lovers, for she was surpassingly beautiful, and most good and true hearted.  But are not people always mistaken who think to find the perfect comprehended in the imperfect, the infinite enchained and made tangible in the finite?  Bah!  The same old story, the same old vicious circle, the everlastingly recurring mathematical view of things that cannot be treated mathematically; the fruitless attempt to measure the harmonious circle of the soul by the angular square of the book.  What poor things our minds are, after all.  We have but one way of thinking derived from what we know, and we incontinently apply it to things of which we can know nothing, and then we quarrel with the result, which is a mere reductio ad absurdum, showing how utterly false and meagre are our hypotheses, premisses, and so-called axioms.  Confucius, who began his system with the startling axiom that “man is good,” arrived at much more really serviceable conclusions than Schopenhauer and all the pessimists put together.  Meanwhile, Isaacs was in love, and, I supposed, expected me to say something appreciative.

“My dear friend,” I began, “it is a rare pleasure to hear any one talk like that; it refreshes a man’s belief in human nature, and enthusiasm, and all kinds of things.  I talked like that some time ago because you would not.  I think you are a most satisfactory convert.”

“I am indeed a convert.  I would not have believed it possible, and now I cannot believe that I ever thought differently.  I suppose it is the way with all converts—­in religion as well—­and with all people who are taken up by a fair-winged genius from an arid desert and set down in a garden of roses.”  He could not long confine himself to ordinary language.  “And yet the hot sand of the desert, and the cool of the night, and the occasional patch of miserable, languishing green, with the little kindly spring in the camel-trodden oasis, seemed all so delightful in the past life that one was quite content, never suspecting the existence of better things.  But now—­I could almost laugh to think of it.  I stand in the midst of the garden that is filled with all things fair, and the tree of life is beside me, blossoming straight and broad with the flowers that wither not, and the fruit that is good to the parched lips and the thirsty spirit.  And the garden is for us to dwell in now, and the eternity of the heavenly spheres is ours hereafter.”  He was all on fire again.  I kept silence for some time; and his hands unfolded, and he raised them and clasped them under his head, and drew a deep long breath, as if to taste the new life that was in him.

“Forgive my bringing you down to earth again,” I said after a while, “but have you made all necessary arrangements?  Is there anything I can do, after you are gone?  Anything to be said to these good people, if they question me about your sudden departure?”