The moon, now soaring high in clear space, shed a luminous rain of silver over all the visible breadth of wild country, and their two figures looked mere dark silhouettes half drowned in the pearly glamour.
"It's worth travelling all the long miles to see!" she declared, stretching her arms out with an enthusiastic gesture--"Oh, beautiful big moon of California! I'm glad I came!" He was silent.
"You are not glad!" she continued--"You are a bear-man in hiding, and the moon says nothing to you!" "It says nothing because it IS nothing"-- he answered, impatiently--"It is a dead planet without heart,--a mere shell of extinct volcanoes where fire once burned, and its light is but the reflection of the sun on its barren surface.

It is like all women,--but mostly like YOU!" She made him a sweeping curtsy so exquisitely graceful that the action resembled nothing so much as the sway of a lily in a light wind.
"Thanks, gentle Knight!--flower of chivalry!" she said--"I see you love me in spite of yourself!" He made a quick stride towards her,--then stopped.

"Love you!" he echoed,--then laughed loudly and derisively-"Great God! Love you?
YOU?
If I did I should be mad! When will you learn the truth of me ?--that women are less in my estimation than the insects crawling on a blade of grass or spawning in a stagnant pond ?--that they have no power to move me to the smallest pulse of passion or desire ?--and that you, of all your sex, seem to my mind the most--" "Hateful ?" she suggested, smilingly.
"No--the most complete and unmitigated bore!" "Dreadful!" and she made a face at him like that of a naughty child,--then she sank down on the sun-baked turf in an easy half-reclining attitude--"It's certainly much worse to be a bore than to be hated.

Hate is quite a live sentiment,--besides it always means, or HAS meant--love! You can't hate anything that is quite indifferent to you, but of course you CAN be bored! YOU are bored by me and I am bored by YOU!--and we are absolutely indifferent to each other! What a comedy it is! Isn't it ?" He stood still and sombre, gazing down at the figure resting on the ground at his feet, its white garments gathering about it as though they were sentiently aware that they must keep the line of classic beauty in every fold.
"Boredom is the trouble"-- she went on--"No one escapes it.

The very babies of to-day are bored.