Katya made a strange noise deep in her throat, as if the words were cracking their way through some obstruction.
"Love does bear any weight—love, but nothing else. Only there is so little love and so few find it. What the world calls love is a flash of desire—a Catherine wheel of emotion, Life's urge to continue tricked out in finery, like an old woman dressed in silk. Fools. They understand nothing. They are afraid of truth, everywhere. To excuse the suffering in the world, the human cruelty of man to man, they have invented the patient, anemic Christ. The fact of sex they have hung over with the ornaments of matrimony. And of Love they know nothing, nothing at all."
Katya had turned while she spoke and was looking out now through the open window to the light-strewn city. Seen so, in profile, the thickness of feature was thinned to hardness. It seemed to Roger, for a moment, that Katya had never been born, would never die. She was like her own steppes, stretching away beyond the weariness of human sight, unhurt by the rage of men. She was eternal truth and courage.
"Perhaps. But if you're not one of the rare few? We have been as happy as most people."
"And now you are content to be as miserable as most people. To go on year after year, dragging at each other, quarreling, making up, hating, despising, driven sometimes, by a force beyond you—to—to—mocking Love."
"Don't," Roger whispered. "Don't. You're exaggerating. One adjusts to anything in time."
"Yes. And then there is no strength left for anything else—and spiritually—you die. You will die. You are weaker than she is, because there is no force so unbreakable as the rigidity of self-righteous mediocrity. You will die—in this 'adjustment,' slowly perhaps, as thousands of others have died, sometimes men, sometimes women, whichever has the finer soul. 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' But a camel goes easier through the eye of a needle than a high purpose breathes with a smaller fastened upon it. Adjust and die."
Katya threw the stub of her cigarette violently out the window and then leaned from it to watch the tiny red spark expiring on the black tarred roof below.
"What—can—I do?"
Katya's brain despised the question and her arms ached for Roger.