me, it presents no question. So if you have no power to which I might be required to render respect, I don't wish to talk of those things:
"'If I told you I did have such power, would you respect it?' he asked.
"I wish I could describe his manner of speaking, how each time he spoke he seemed to arise out of a state of contemplation very like that state into which I felt I was drifting, from which it took so much to wrench myself; and yet he never moved, and seemed at all times alert. This distracted me while at the same time I was powerfully attracted by it, as I was by this room, its simplicity, its rich, w combination of essentials: the books, the desk, the two chairs by the fire, the coffin, the pictures. The luxury of those rooms in the hotel seemed vulgar, but more than that, meaningless, beside this room. I understood all of it except for the mortal boy, the sleeping boy, whom I didn't understand at all.
"'I'm not certain,' I said, unable to keep my eyes off that awful medieval Satan. 'I would have to know from what... from whom it comes. Whether it came from other vampires... or elsewhere'
"'Elsewhere... ' he said. 'What is elsewhere?
"'That?' I pointed to the medieval picture.
" 'That is a picture,' he said.
"'Nothing more?'
"'Nothing more.'
"'Then Satan... some satanic power doesn't give you your power here, either as leader or as vampire?'
"'No,' he said calmly, so calmly it was impossible for me to know what he thought of my questions, if he thought of them at all in the manner which I knew to be thinking.
"'And the other vampires?'
" "No,' he said.
"'Then we are not... ' I sat forward.'.... the children of Satan?'
"'How could we be the children of Satan?' he asked.'Do you believe that Satan made this world around you?'
"'No, I believe that God made it, if anyone made it. But He also must have made Satan, and I want to know if we are his children!'
"'Exactly, and consequently if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan's power comes from God and that Satan is simply God's child, and that we are God's children also. There are no children of Satan, really.'
"I couldn't disguise my feelings at this. I sat back against the leather, looking at that small woodcut of the devil, released for the moment from any sense of obligation to Armand's presence, lost in my thoughts, in the undeniable implications of his simple logic.
" 'But why does this concern you? Surely what I say doesn't surprise you,' he said.'Why do you let it affect you?'
"'Let me explain,' I began.'I know that you're a master vampire. I respect you. But I'm incapable of your detachment. I know what it is, and I do not possess it and I doubt that I ever will. I accept this.'
"'I understand,' he nodded.'I saw you in the theater, your suffering, your sympathy with that girl. I saw your sympathy for Denis when I offered him to you; you die when you kill, as if you feel that you deserve to die, and you stint on nothing. But why, with this passion and this sense of justice, do you wish to call yourself the child of Satan!'
"'I'm evil, evil as any vampire who ever lived! I've killed over and over and will do it again. I took that boy, Denis, when you gave him to me, though I was incapable of knowing whether he would survive or not.'
" 'Why does that make you as evil as any vampire? Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?'
"'Yes, I think it is,' I said to him.'It's not logical, as you would make it sound. But it's that dark, that empty. And it is without consolation.'
"'But you're not being fair,' he said with the first glimmer of expression in his voice.'Surely you attribute great degrees and variations to goodness. There is the goodness of the child which is innocence, and then there is the goodness of the monk who has given up everything to others and lives a life of self-deprivation and service. The goodness of saints, the goodness of good housewives. Are all these the same?'
"'No. But equally and infinitely different from evil.' I answered.
"I didn't know I thought these things. I spoke them now as my thoughts. And they were my most profound