“You must love life before you can know it.”
“You must love it, and lose it, before you can know it. I have had joy, Eppie; I have loved life. My experience has not been peculiarly personal; it is merely the history of all thought, pushed far enough.”
“Of all mere thought, yes.”
She rested her head on her hand as she looked at him, seeming to wonder over him and his thought, his mere thought, dispassionately. “Don’t be shy, or afraid, for me. Why should you mind? I’ve given you my story; give me yours. Tell me about your life.”
He felt, suddenly, sunken there in his deep chair, passive and peaceful in the firelight, that it would be very easy to tell her. Why shouldn’t she see it all and understand it all? He couldn’t hurt her; it would be only a strange, a sorrowful picture to her; and to him, yes, there would be a relief in the telling. To speak, for the first time in his life—it would be like the strewing of rosemary on a grave, a commemoration that would have its sweetness and its balm.
But he hesitated, feeling the helplessness of his race before verbal self-expression.
Eppie lent him a hand.
“Begin with when you left me.”
“What was I then? I hardly remember. A tiresome, self-centered boy.”
“No; you weren’t self-centered. You believed in God, then, and you loved your mother. Why have both of them, as personalities, become illusions to you?”