“Ah, there you are, shining, shining,” he said. “And I can’t reach you. Tell me what you feel like inside that makes you what you are. I want to get at it, and I can’t. It isn’t that you keep it back—oh, I know that—but I am not tall enough!”
For one moment she tried to laugh it off.
“I see you want to make me talk like Ambrose,” she said.
“Yes, darling; you do it so naturally,” said Hugh. “So go on.”
Again she leaned forward toward his radiant face.
“There is no impulse I can teach you, dear,” she said, “and you can only teach yourself, or let years teach you all the rest, which is practice. I have had so much more practice than you, simply because I am so much older. It is only that, for one requires the same situation to be presented to one hundreds and thousands of times before one really draws the moral. And I have so often seen my own anger making misery not only for others but for myself, that at last I began really to connect the two. One is like a puppy for so many years, and it takes one a lot of beating and being tied up to realise that it is not a good plan to gnaw other people’s shoes or to snap at other people’s hands. And slowly—oh, my Hugh, so slowly—I have learned a sort of patience, a sort of toleration for other people’s opinions. I have actually begun to believe that there are other people in the world beside myself, and that they have just as good a right to their opinion as I have to mine, and that when I happen to disagree with them it may be just possible, as Oliver Cromwell said, that I may be mistaken. Sometimes, as about this unfortunate paper of mine, my reasonable self tells me that I am right and they are wrong. Yes, I will concede that now. But what then? I may be mistaken. At any rate, at that point the law of kindness comes in. They don’t want this paper; in fact, your sister said she would resign—now be kind—rather than send out the notices. But why, why because I disagree should I make a fuss and cause unpleasantness? Do let us all be as happy and pleasant as we can. I know perfectly well that all of them are acting up to their best motives; they really think that the subject I chose was not a fit one. So I should be acting on the very worst motive if I tried to embarrass or vex them. You and I lose none of our happiness or pleasure if I write something else; and even if we did, perhaps it wouldn’t matter very much. We have got plenty left, haven’t we?”
She sat upright again for a moment, and let her eyes wander over the lawn, the quiet trees, the gray back of the down, the green water-meadow below. Then they came back to Hugh.
“It is silly to talk about the paper,” she said, “for the whole thing is so infinitesimal. But it did happen to be the text when you bade me discourse. And, after all, either nothing is infinitesimal, or else everything is. Oh, my dear, if we think of the thousand generations that came before us, and will come after, who laugh and love and hate and are angry, what do you and I matter? But we matter to God. He has chosen to put the infinite within us. Because we are human, we have to make finite things of it, but let us make them as big as we can.”
She rose with shining eyes, and stretched out her two hands to him.
“It is getting damp,” she said. “Let me pull you up.”