I said, stupidly, that I didn’t know.
“Of course you don’t know if you don’t think; but try to think!”
“What good will thinking do when we see how things are?”
“It’ll show us how to make the best of them, won’t it?”
“Is there any best to be made of your marrying anybody else than me? The way things happen isn’t necessarily the best way.”
After her hesitating syncopated sentences in dealing with what was more directly personal to her life and mine she talked now not so much calmly as surely, as of subjects she had long thought out.
“I don’t say the best way absolutely; but the best in view of what we’ve made for ourselves. For ourselves you and I have made things hard. There’s no question about that. But isn’t it for both of us now to live this minute so that the next won’t be any harder?”
There was no argument in this; there was only appeal.
“What,” I asked, “do you mean by that?”
“I suppose I mean that the best way to live this minute is to accept what it contains—till it develops into something else—as it will. This isn’t final. It’s only a step on the way to—”