Those questions seemed to me a bit hairsplitting.

"Don't get overly optimistic about death," I said. "I'm warning you. My views are changing. The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky."

He smiled, dismissively, as he used to do when he was mortal and visibly wore the laurels of venerable age.

"Have you ever read the stories of Hawthorne?" he asked me softly. We had reached the street, crossed, and were slowly skirting the fountain before the Plaza.

"Yes," I said. "At some time or other."

"And you remember Ethan Brand's search for the unpardonable sin?"

"I think so. He went off to search for it and left his fellow man behind."

"Recall this paragraph," he said gently. We made our way down Fifth, a street that is never empty, or dark. He quoted the lines to me: " 'He had lost his hold of themagnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.' "

I said nothing. I wanted to protest, but it was not an honest thing to do. I wanted to say that I would never, never treat humans like puppets. All I had done was watch Roger, damn it all, and Gretchen in the jungles, I had pulled no strings. Honesty had undone her and me together. But then he wasn't speaking of me with these words. He was talking about himself, the distance he felt now from the human. He had only begun to be Ethan Brand.

"Let me continue a little farther," he asked respectfully, then began to quote again. "

'Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect—' " He broke off.

I didn't reply.

"That's our damnation," he whispered. "Our moral improvement has reached its finish, and our intellect grows by leaps and bounds."

Still I said nothing. What was I to say? Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again.

Meaningless, I almost said, aloud, but what came from my lips was completely different.

"I have Dora to think of," I said.

Dora.

"Yes, and thanks to you," he said, "I have Dora too, now don't I?"

Chapter Six