"You think that a misfortune," she commented. "You feel that it is a step farther into the darkness."
"It is to narrow rather than to broaden his horizon, is it not?"
She played with her fan a moment, smiling to herself in a way which he did not understand, and looking down as if considering some old memory. Then she met his glance with a look at once kind and wistful.
"It isn't of much use to argue the matter, I suppose," were her words. "It seems to me as if in talking to you I see my old mental self in a mirror, if you'll pardon me for saying so. When we come out from any conviction, and most of all from a religious belief, it seems to us a profound misfortune that any man should still believe what we have decided is false. By and by I think you will see that the chief point is that a man shall believe. What he believes doesn't so much matter. It must be the thing that best suits his temperament."
"Then to outgrow a dogma is to weaken our power. It certainly weakens our faith in general."
"Yes," she assented, "that is the price we must pay for freedom; but if Philip can still believe, I have long ago passed the place where I should regret it. Perhaps he is to be envied."
Maurice shook his head.
"We may feel like that in some moods," he concluded with a smile, "but certainly nothing would induce you to change places with him." "Oh, no," she cried; "certainly not. But that is mere womanly lack of logic!"
XXXIII
A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN
Love's Labor's Lost, i. 1.