“You don’t even know what makes human wretchedness. It isn’t poverty. Why, Al, if you could make everyone perfectly comfortable this very night, if you could take away all hunger and want and injustice, it wouldn’t give one little bit of happiness to any of the people who had lost someone they loved. It wouldn’t help a woman who had lost her man, or a mother who’d lost a baby. That’s what you don’t know. Nothing can ever, ever be done to spare people their anguish.... I always know—it comes across me in my very happiest moments—that the day is coming nearer and nearer when we’ll have to part—one of us to leave the other forever.... What do you think you can do for that?”
“That’s morbid,” he said, curtly. “No healthy person thinks about death like that.”
But he caught her close to his heart and looked down at her bent head with troubled eyes, stroked her soft hair with an uncertain hand.
“I’ve never heard you talk like this,” he said. “I don’t like it, darling! Don’t you believe that we’ll meet again—afterward?”
“It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t do any good, even if we knew. People who do believe that suffer just as much. More, I think, because they haven’t as much fortitude as the ones who don’t believe. Look at you. You think all these miserable people are going to be made happy somewhere after they’re dead, but it doesn’t seem to give you much comfort.”
“I don’t look at it that way, Andrée. The world seems to me like a—sort of school, and I want to see everyone get a chance to learn all there is to know, in decency and—dignity, before it’s over.”
“Maybe your way isn’t a good way. Maybe they learn more as things are.”
“Injustice never teaches anyone anything but resentment and malice.”
“I’m going to play!” she said, suddenly. “Oh, Al! Al! Why didn’t you let me be happy? It may be only for such a little while!”
“I didn’t mean to make you unhappy! I wouldn’t for anything in the world. I’m sorry! Don’t play! That damned music sets you all on edge. Stay here and talk to me!”