“I pray,” said Mary, “that my dream may come true.”
And Monk, he said, “So you build your life on a prayer and a dream!”
“I do not build my life at all,” said Mary; “it’s my death I am building, in a wonderful world of mountains....”
“... that can never be climbed,” cried Monk.
“... and grand rivers....”
“... that stand still and do not flow,” says he.
“... and bright shining fields....”
“... that will never come to the reaping,” says he again.
“... and if the climbing and the flowing and the reaping are illusions here, they are real in the dreams of God.”
And Monk, he said: “If God himself is the illusion, Mary, there’s little enough reward for a life of that kind, or the death of it either. The recompense for living is Life—not in the future or merely in the present, but life in the past where all our intuitions had their mould, and all our joys their eternal fountain.”