“First,” she said thoughtfully, “a desire to know and a willingness to be known. Then I think one must forget one’s self as much as possible, and try to understand the feelings, and words, and acts of the one you wish to know in the light of the whole life, or as much as you can learn of it, not merely of the present. Then, too, I am quite sure that you must be alone together, for it is only alone that people will talk of the most real things.”
He was silent, trying in his own mind to fit her words to his own need.
“Then you don’t think, as some do, that when once we set out with a real desire all the rest is quite easy and to be drifted into without any special effort.”
“No,” she said, “I do not believe in drifting. And if we were not so lazy I believe we should all of us know more of God. It is somehow difficult to take quite so much pains about that as about other things.”
“It can’t surely be difficult to you; it always seems to be easy to women, but to us men all is so different.”
“Are you so sure of that?” she said quietly.
“I have always fancied so,” he replied. “Why, the very idea of shutting one’s self in alone to think—to pray—it is so utterly unnatural to a man.”
“I suppose the harder it is the more it is necessary,” said Cecil. “But our Lord was not always praying on mountains; he was living a quite ordinary shop life, and must have been as busy as you are.”
Her words startled him; everything connected with Christianity had been to him lifeless, unreal, formal—something utterly apart from the every-day life of a nineteenth century man. She had told him that to her religion meant “knowing” and “loving,” and he now perceived that by “loving” she meant the active living of the Christ-life, the constant endeavor to do the will of God. She had not actually said this in so many words, but he knew more plainly than if she had spoken that this was her meaning.
They paced in silence the shady garden walk. To Frithiof the whole world seemed wider than it had ever been before. On the deadly monotony of his business life there had arisen a light which altogether transformed it. He did his best even now to quench its brightness, and said to himself, “This will not last; I shall hate desk and counter and all the rest of it as badly as ever when I go back.” For it was his habit since Blanche had deceived him to doubt the lastingness of all that he desired to keep. Still, though he doubted for the future, the present was wonderfully changed, and the new idea that had come into his life was the best medicine he could have had.