“If one only could—” said Meta.
“You can—don’t say otherwise,” exclaimed Norman; “I know, at least, that you and my father can.”
“Dr. May does so, more than any one I know,” said Meta.
“Yes,” said Norman again; “it is his secret of joy. To him, it is never, ‘I am half sick of shadows’.”
“To him they are not shadows, but foretastes,” said Meta. Silence again; and when she spoke, she said, “I have always thought it must be such a happiness to have power of any kind that can be used in direct service, or actual doing good.”
“No,” said Norman. “Whatever becomes a profession, becomes an unreality.”
“Surely not, in becoming a duty,” said Meta.
“Not for all,” he answered; “but where the fabric erected by ourselves, in the sight of the world, is but an outer case, a shell of mere words, blown up for the occasion, strung together as mere language; then, self-convicted, we shrink within the husk, and feel our own worthlessness and hypocrisy.”
“As one feels in reproving the school children for behaving ill at church?” said Meta.
“You never felt anything approaching to it!” said Norman. “To know oneself to be such a deception, that everything else seems a delusion too!”