"Does history fascinate you because it's just interesting?" he asked. "Or does it do something else? Don't you ever want to know what the reason is behind some of the things these people do in the pages of the books?"

"Yes, I want to know the reasons," she said. "Like I want to know the reason they nailed that man to the oaken cross. I want to know why they did that to him."

"A good question," he mused. "Which reminds me, at about the same time as they were nailing him to that cross, it was decided in China that the forces of the universe were to be represented by a circle, half black, half white. But to remind themselves that there was no pure force, no purely unique reason, they put a spot of white paint in the black half and a spot of black paint in the white. Isn't that interesting?"

She looked at him and wondered how he had gotten from one to the other. But he was going on.

"And do you remember the goldsmith, the lover, how he recorded in his autobiography that at age four, he and his father saw the Fabulous Salamander on their hearth by the fire; and his father suddenly smacked the boy ten feet across the room into a rack of kettles, saying something to the effect that little Cellini was too young to remember the incident unless some pain accompanied it."

"I remember that story," she said. "And I remember that Cellini said that he wasn't sure if the smack was the reason he remembered the Salamander, or the Salamander the reason he remembered the smack."

"Yes, yes!" he cried. "That's it. The reason, the reasons ... Don't you see the pattern?"

"Only I don't know what a Salamander is," she told him.

"Well, it's like the blue lizards that sing outside your window sometimes," he explained. "Only it isn't blue, and it doesn't sing."

"Then why should anyone want to remember it?" she grinned. It was an attempt to annoy him, but he was not looking at her, and was talking of something else.

"And the painter," he was saying, "he was a friend of Cellini, you remember, in Florence. He was painting a picture of "La Gioconda." As a matter of fact, he had to take time from the already crumbling picture of "The Last Supper" of the man who was nailed to the cross of oak to paint her. And he put a smile on her face of which men asked for centuries, 'What is the reason she smiles so 

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