“I wish I could make you quarrel. I suspect you of loving everything,” Eppie declared.
She didn’t pursue him further on this occasion, when, indeed, he might accuse himself of having given her every chance; but on the next day, as they sat out at the edge of the birch-wood in a wonderfully warm afternoon sun, he, she, and Peter the dog (what a strange, changed echo it was), she returned, very lightly, to their discussion, tossing merely a few reconnoitering flowers in at his open window.
She had never, since their remeeting, seemed to him so young. Holding a little branch of birch, she broke off and aimed bits of its bark at a tall gorse-bush near them. Peter basked, full length, in the sunlight at their feet. The day had almost the indolent quiet of summer.
Eppie said, irrelevantly, for they had not been talking of that, but of people again, gossiping pleasantly, with gossip tempered to the day’s mildness: “I can’t bear the religions of peace, you see—any faith that takes the fight out of people. That Molly Carruthers I was telling you about has become a Christian Scientist, and she is in an imbecile condition of beatitude all the time. ‘Isn’t the happiness that comes of such a faith proof enough?’ she says to me. As if happiness were a proof! A drunkard is happy. Some people seem to me spiritually tipsy, and as unfit for usefulness as the drunkard. I think I distrust anything that gives a final satisfaction.”
She amused him in her playing with half-apprehended thoughts. Her assurance was as light as though they were the bits of birch-bark she tossed.
“You make me think a little of Nietzsche,” he said.
“I should rather like Nietzsche right side up, I think. As he is standing on his head most of the time, it’s rather confusing. If it is a blind, unconscious force that has got hold of us, we get hold of it, and of ourselves, when we consciously use it for our own ends. But I’m not a bit a Nietzschian, Gavan, for, as an end, an Overman doesn’t at all appeal to me and I don’t intend to make myself a bridge for him to march across. Of course Nietzsche might reply, ‘You are the bridge, whether you want to be or not.’ He might say, ‘It’s better to walk willingly to your inevitable holocaust than to be rebelliously haled along; whatever you do, you are only the refuse whose burning makes the flame.’ I reply to that, that if the Overman is sure to come, why should I bother about him? I wouldn’t lift my finger for a distant perfection in which I myself, and all those I loved, only counted as fuel. But, on the other hand, I do believe that each one of us is going to grow into an Overman—in a quite different sense. Peter, too, will be an Overdog, and will, no doubt, sometime be more conscious than we are now.”
Gavan glanced at her and at Peter with his vague, half-unseeing glance.
“Why don’t you smile?” Eppie asked. “Not that you don’t smile, often. But you haven’t a scrap of gaiety, Gavan. Do stop soaring in the sky and come down to real things, to the earth, to me, to dear little rudimentary Overdogs.”
“Do you think that dear little rudimentary dogs are nearer reality than the sky?” He did smile now.