"We have a little company of twenty or thirty, who meet together in the evening after the dinner is over. No one else ever comes to the Museum. As soon as it is dark, you know very well, the People all creep home and go to bed; but my friends come here. It was Christine who began it. She found or made the dresses for us; she beguiled us into forgetting the Present and going back to the Past. Now we have succeeded in caring nothing at all about the Present. We began by pretending. It is no longer pretence. The Past lives again, and we hate the Present. Oh, we hate and loathe it!"
"Yes, yes. But how do you revive the Past?"
"We have dances. You used to dance very well formerly, my dear Harry. That was before you walked every day in a grand Procession, and took the highest place in the Public Hall. I wonder if you could dance again? Nature's secrets are not so heavy that they would clog your feet, are they? We sing and play: the old music has been found, and we are beginning to play it properly again. We talk; we act little drawing-room plays; sometimes we draw or paint; and--oh, Harry!--the men have begun again to make Love--real, ardent Love! All the dear old passions are reviving. We are always finding other poor creatures like ourselves, who were once ladies and gentlemen, and now are aimless and soulless; and we recruit them."
"What will Grout say when he finds it out?"
"He can never make us go back to the Present again. So far, I defy Grout, Harry."
"The old life!" he said; "the old life! I will confess, Mildred, that I have never forgotten it--not for a day; and I have never ceased to regret that it was not continued."
"Grout pulled it to pieces; but we will revive it."
"If it could be revived; but that is impossible."
"Nothing is impossible to you--nothing--to you. Consider, Harry," she whispered. "You have the Secret."
"Come and see the old life revived. Come this evening; come, dear Harry." She laid a hand upon his arm. "Come, for auld lang syne. Can the old emotions revive again, even in the breast of the Arch Physician?"
His eyes met hers. He trembled--a sure sign that the old spirit was reviving in him. Then he spoke in a kind of murmur:
"I have been living alone so long--so long--that I thought there was nothing left but solitude forever. Grout likes it. He will have it that loneliness belongs to the Higher Life."