The Doctor laughed.
'That may be so. Matthew and Minouche are also happier than we are. Ah! I recognise in that remark of yours the young man of to-day, who has nibbled at the sciences and filled himself with discontent because they have not enabled him to satisfy his old ideas of the absolute, ideas which he sucked in with his mother's milk. At the very first attempt you want to discover every truth in the sciences, whereas we can barely decipher them, when, maybe, the inquiry will go on for ever. Then you begin to say that there is nothing in them, and you try to fall back upon your old faith, which will have nothing more to do with you, and so you drop into pessimism. Yes! pessimism is the disease of the end of the century. You are a set of Werthers turned upside down!'
This was the Doctor's favourite subject, and he grew quite animated over it. Lazare, on his side, exaggerated his denial of all certainty, and his belief in final and universal evil.
'How can we live,' he asked, 'when at every moment things give way beneath our feet?'
The old man yielded to an impulse of youthful passion as he retorted:
'Why, just go on living! Isn't life itself sufficient? Happiness consists in action.'
Then he abruptly addressed himself to Pauline, who was listening with a smile on her face.
'Come now!' he said, 'tell us what you do to be always cheerful!'
'Oh!' she replied, in a joking tone, 'I try to forget all about myself, for fear lest I should grow melancholy, and I think about others; that occupies my mind, and makes me bear my troubles patiently.'