this body of mine!"

"Not at all. You will quit it."

"And that will be the end."

"How do you know that?"

The boy was aghast. Materialism was part and parcel of his grandfather's
creed: he thought that it was only the priest-ridden prigs who believed
in an eternal life. He knew that his friend was not such a one: and he
wondered if Olivier could be speaking seriously. But Olivier held his
hand and expounded at length his idealistic faith, and the unity of
boundless life, that has neither beginning nor end, in which all the
millions of creatures and all the million million moments of time are
but rays of the sun, the sole source of it all. But he did not put it to
him in such an abstract form. Instinctively, when he talked to the boy,
he adapted himself to his mode of thought;--ancient legends, the
material and profound fancies of old cosmogonies were called to mind:
half in fun, half in earnest, he spoke of metempsychosis and the
succession of countless forms through which the soul passes and flows,
like a spring passing from pool to pool. All this was interspersed with
reminiscences of Christianity and images taken from the summer evening,
the light of which was cast upon them both. He was sitting by the open
window, and the boy was standing by his side, and their hands were
clasped. It was a Saturday evening. The bells were ringing. The earliest
swallows, only just returned, were skimming the walls of the houses. The
dim sky was smiling above the city, which was wrapped in shadow. The boy
held his breath and listened to the fairy-tale his man friend was
telling him. And Olivier, warmed by the eagerness of his young hearer,