"Is it serious? Will I die?" -- "In this world everything is serious -- and nothing." Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram's outward signs of majesty that had been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the shoulders, the forehead, the massive brow and nose and chin -- an "ensemble" of unabused power, the handiwork of Nature at her best, a creation worth while, worth preserving intact and immortal. "Yes," he answered, with satiric bitterness; "you will have to die, and rot, just like the rest of us."