"My God!" Ethan broke out; "and to think I called you an optimist! Why, you're just such another as Job, crying out: 'Let the day perish wherein I was born.' 'Oh, that I had given up the ghost, and no eye seen me'; or the Genevan confessing: 'Ma naissance fut le premier de mes malheurs.'" He would have been ready to swear that he was writhing, not under the sense of an impassible barrier raised between him and some concrete coveted good, but at being confronted, where he least expected it, with a new aspect of the ugliness and pain and helplessness of the human lot. "It doesn't seem to matter which way one turns," he burst out; "the sound loudest in one's ears is the lament of all the generations that have gone up and down hunting happiness, till, as you say, they fell on sleep. Whether I go to the classics or read the new philosophies, whether it's Socrates or Seneca preaching the dignity of death, or the volcanic Nietzsche trying gloomily to exalt self, and losing himself in madness—whether I wander the Old World, or fly for better things to the New, it's the same thing. You began by telling me life was beautiful and good; you have ended by showing me afresh that it simply doesn't bear being thought about. Why, Val!"
He had risen and caught sight of the white, tear-drowned face looking out behind the chair.
"Val!" echoed her father; "I thought you were in bed!"
"Oh, I wish I had been!" She came out of the corner with her plumage of brave looks crushed and broken, all her young brightness tarnished. "Father," she said, while the tears rained down, "I'm sorry you're so sad about the world, and about all us Ganos, but you needn't try to make cousin Ethan sad too, and me—and me—"
Ethan made a gesture forward, as if to take the girl in his protecting arms. John Gano's angry eyes flashed warning. He tried to hush his daughter's sobbing in his breast.
"You are my wise little girl, and you—"
"Wise! Yes; a great deal too wise to believe all this. I don't know why I'm crying so." She looked up, smiling miserably through her tears. "Why, it's just nothing but arguing. When cousin Ethan's with me he never has such awful, awful notions. He's a little sad sometimes, and has to be cheered up, and you oughtn't to argue with him like this—"
The heaving sobs clutched her voice, stifling the last words.
"Come, come, child; you're over-excited. There—there!"
"When I'm old"—she flung back her head with a poor little travesty of her common gesture—"I'll tell my children—all of them—that it's been a good world to be in, and that they're not to be afraid, and—and not to be any sadder than they can help."