“Not that, perhaps, but very transitory; and to be tied to the transitory is to suffer.”
“On that plan one ends with nothingness.”
“Do you think so?”
“Do you think so?” She turned his question on him and her eyes, with the question, fixed hard on his face.
He felt suddenly that after all the parrying and thrusting she had struck up his foil and faced him with no mask of gaiety—in deadly earnest. There was the click of steel in the question.
He did not know whether he were the more irritated, for her sake, by her persistency, or the more fearful that, unwillingly, he should do her faith some injury.
“I think,” he said, “more or less as Tolstoi thinks. You understood all that very well the other evening; so why go into it?”
“You think that our human identity is unreal—an appearance?”
“Most certainly.”
“And that the separation between us is the illusion that makes hatred and evil, and that with the recognition of the illusion, love would come and all selfish effort cease?”