Gradually they fell silent. Jerome felt the peace close about him, the tangible, unfathomable peace that Jean felt. They smoked and forgot each other, looking into the night.
At last Jerome spoke, softly, as if he were interpreting something whispered to him in the stillness.
"What a lot of useless pain there is in the world. One feels it in a place like this, almost as if we chose needlessly to be unhappy."
"Do you feel that, too? Sometimes I'm afraid all my standards are going to be upset here. Sometimes I feel as if I had gotten everything twisted a long way back and that it was struggling to get right again."
"And that process itself can hurt terribly."
Jean smiled, a little wistfully. "I am beginning to suspect that it can. It used to make me furious when I was growing up to be told that all pain was 'for the best.' But, now, I believe it was only the wording of it, the tight, prim smugness of the assurance that rasped. It's not that pain is for the best, but it's simply that it doesn't matter. It's part of a whole, and, unless we can make a new whole, with no so-called pain in it, there's no credit to a deeper insight in just kicking."
"I suppose it's because action of any kind always seems the stronger part. Rebellion, in some way, seems bigger than acceptance."
"Perhaps it is. The way an agnostic always seems to be a more independent thinker than the believer in a higher power, a God, or a Spirit, or any Force, you can't prove by logic. It seems as if a believer must have inherited his beliefs ready-made, as if he could not possibly have come to them by any real intellectual effort of his own."
"But the world is swinging back, it seems to me. Perhaps æons and æons ago we thought ourselves out of simplicity and now we're thinking ourselves back. Physicists are beginning to reduce all force to one energy and philosophers seem to be working round to the one spiritual impulse, love. I wonder whether after all we've left Christ and Confucius and Buddha far behind, or whether we haven't caught up."
"I wonder," Jean said thoughtfully. "And I suppose, till the end of time, we'll go on struggling to find out whether it's an impulse pushing up from within or whether it's a condition imposed from without; whether brotherly love is an ideal we can't quite attain or whether it's a law we can't escape."