"'You do not love me,' said the Tragedian in a thin batlike voice: and he was now very difficult to see.
'I cannot love a lie,' said the Lady. 'I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love and out of it I will not go.'"
'And yet...and yet...,' said I to my Teacher, when all the shapes and the singing had passed some distance into the forest, 'even now I am not quite sure. Is it really possible that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?'
'Would ye rather he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthly marriage.'
'Well, no. I suppose I don't want that.'
'The passion of Pity, the Pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded andto flatter when they should not speak - that will die.
.....Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.'
'Why couldn't the Lady chase him as he ran back to Hell?' (paraphrasing) said I.
He nodded. 'There's not enough room for her,' he said. 'Hell could not open its mouth wide enough.'
'And she couldn't make herself smaller? -like Alice, you know.'
'Nothing like small enough. For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes are fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.
'Then no one can ever reach them?'
'Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. And He has already done it. There is no spirit in prison to Whom He did not preach.'
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