"I know," he says, "that she will be happier here, and that they
will value her better than she has been valued upon earth."

His interruption serves to turn me back from my momentary
contemplation of those popular effigies inflated by old newspapers
and windy report, the earthly great. He sets me thinking of more
personal and intimate applications, of the human beings one knows
with a certain approximation to real knowledge, of the actual common
substance of life. He turns me to the thought of rivalries and
tendernesses, of differences and disappointments. I am suddenly
brought painfully against the things that might have been. What if
instead of that Utopia of vacant ovals we meet relinquished loves
here, and opportunities lost and faces as they might have looked to
us?

I turn to my botanist almost reprovingly. "You know, she won't be
quite the same lady here that you knew in Frognal," I say, and wrest
myself from a subject that is no longer agreeable by rising to my
feet.

"And besides," I say, standing above him, "the chances against our
meeting her are a million to one.... And we loiter! This is not the
business we have come upon, but a mere incidental kink in our larger
plan. The fact remains, these people we have come to see are people
with like infirmities to our own--and only the conditions are
changed. Let us pursue the tenour of our inquiry."

With that I lead the way round the edge of the Lake of Lucendro
towards our Utopian world.