OLAVUS. Why not?
REGINALD. I think it is device of the devil to make people hate each other.
CHRISTINE. Good for you, Reginald!
OLAVUS. And it had to come to this in my own house! Pulchre, bene, rede!—Who, Reginald, do you think has caused this dissension under which you young people are suffering now?
REGINALD. That's easily answered.
OLAVUS. Of course! We old ones, you mean? But we, too, were children of our time, and were stripped of our faith by our prophets. Who is, then, to blame?
REGINALD. No one.
OLAVUS. And what do you mean to do with your future?
REGINALD. My future? It appears to me like a grey mist without a ray of sunlight. And should a ray ever break through, it will at once be proved a will-o'-the-wisp leading us astray.
OLAVUS. That's just how I felt once! At your age I could see my whole future as in vision. I foresaw the bitter cup and the pillory. And yet I had to go on. I had to enter the mist, and I myself had to carry the will-o'-the-wisp that must lead the wanderers astray. I foretold this very moment, even, when my son would stand before me saying: "Thus I am, because thus you have made me!" You noticed, perhaps, that I was not surprised—and this is the reason.