"Oh, no! Not that, I hope!" The word alarmed her. It was worse than
pope. Through her puzzled mind stole a stealthy, dangerous thing ...
like a panther.

"I like to think that even in decay there's life," the painter murmured.
"The falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency, there's force and
motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in the breaking up and crumbling
of everything indeed. And take an inert stone: it's crammed with heat
and weight and potencies of all sorts. What holds its particles together
indeed? We understand it as little as gravity or why a needle always
turns to the 'North.' Both things may be a mode of life...."

"You think a compass has a soul, Mr. Sanderson?" exclaimed the lady with
a crackling of her silk flounces that conveyed a sense of outrage even
more plainly than her tone. The artist smiled to himself in the
darkness, but it was Bittacy who hastened to reply.

"Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies," he said
quietly, "may be due to some kind of life we cannot understand. Why
should water only run downhill? Why should trees grow at right angles to
the surface of the ground and towards the sun? Why should the worlds
spin for ever on their axes? Why should fire change the form of
everything it touches without really destroying them? To say these
things follow the law of their being explains nothing. Mr. Sanderson
merely suggests--poetically, my dear, of course--that these may be
manifestations of life, though life at a different stage to ours."

"The '_ breath_ of life,' we read, 'He breathed into them. These things
do not breathe." She said it with triumph.