"I have made nothing," she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing herself. She would explain origins, now.
"Your"--she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of the country, or the populations of the earth--"your ancestors were mine, but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted diseases, as we shall contract them,--beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity ... of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts--you have forgotten!"
She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionate assurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith. We approached a little roadside inn. On a bench before the door a dun-clad country fellow was asleep, his head on the table.
"Put your fingers in your ears," my companion commanded.
I saw her lips move. The countryman started, shuddered, and by a clumsy, convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his eyes. Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.
"I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion," I commented. "I know there are words that have certain effects. But you shouldn't play pranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus."
"It isn't good form, I suppose?" she sneered.
"It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, "the poor fellow has lost his beer."
"What's that to me?" she commented, with the air of one affording a concrete illustration.
I said nothing. She ceased her exposition immediately afterward, growing silent as suddenly as she had become discoursive. It was rather as if she had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it. I was quite at a loss as to what she was driving at. There was a newness, a strangeness about her; sometimes she struck me as mad, sometimes as frightfully sane. We had a meal somewhere--a meal that broke the current of her speech--and then, in the late afternoon, took a by-road and wandered in secluded valleys. I had been ill; trouble of the nerves, brooding, the monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess. I had an errand in this part of the world and had been approaching it deviously, seeking the normal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to my old self. I did not wish to think of how I should get through the year--of the thousand little things that matter. So I talked and she--she listened very well.