“Well,” with a real sense of amusement over the inner icy weight, she was ready to put it in its crudest, most inclusive terms, “he doesn’t believe in immortality.”
Grainger stared, taken aback by the ingenuous avowal.
“Immortality? No more do I,” he retorted.
“Oh, yes, you do,” said Eppie, looking not at him but out at the summer sky. “You believe in life and so you do believe in immortality, even though you don’t know that you do. You are, like most energetic people, too much preoccupied with living to know what your life means, that’s all.”
“My dear child,”—Grainger was fond of this form of appellation, an outlet for the pent-up forces of his baffled tenderness,—“any one who is alive finds life worth while without a Paradise to complete it, and any one who isn’t a coward doesn’t turn from it because it’s also unhappy.”
“If you think that Gavan does that you mistake the very essence of his skepticism, or, if you like to call it so, of his faith. It’s not because he finds it unhappy that he turns from it, but because he finds it meaningless.”
“Meaningless?—a place where one can work, achieve, love, suffer?”
Grainger jerked out the words from an underlying growl of protest.
Eppie now looked from the sky to him, her unconscious ally. “Dear old Jim, I like to hear you. You’ve got it, all. Every word you say implies immortality. It’s all a question of being conscious of one’s real needs and then of trusting them.”
“Life, here, now, could satisfy my needs,” he said.