“I don’t see why any belief of mine should interest you.”
“But it does. Tell me!”
“This is not my hour for lecturing. I’d much rather talk about you.”
“Oh, please don’t be unhumanly modest. Go on, you’ve roused my curiosity now, and I will know what you think.”
“Very well. Not being an unreasoning oyster, I believe in a future state. Not in the old-fashioned business, of course; but if a man has ever thought, and if he has had two or three generations of thinking ancestors behind him, he hardly believes that the scheme of creation is so purposeless as to turn people of progressive development loose on one unsatisfactory plane, only.” Clive spoke rapidly when he spoke at length, but paused abruptly every now and again, then resumed without impulsion. “What would be the object? What meaning? Everything else in the scheme of creation has a meaning, leads to something definite.... That is the significance of the lack of soul you search for in a race of men that have not yet had time to develop it—who are yet surely progressing toward such a consummation.... On this earth it takes generations of leisure, of art, of literature, of science, but mainly of individual thinking, to develop the subtle combination which puts man in relation with the divine principle in the universe. The pre-eminent development of England over all other nations is as indisputable as it is natural. What would be the object of such mental and spiritual development if this incomplete life of ours were all? We go on afterward, of course; ascending by slow and laborious evolution, from plane to plane.”
“And about the other thing? You believe that in one existence or another you meet the person who satisfies you in all things—your other part?”
“Perhaps two in a century meet in this existence. But most of us don’t—for centuries. Perhaps millions of centuries. Time is nothing. Your man may not be born here for several centuries—but you will find him some time. And when you do, you and he will become biunial—one in a sense that I believe passes all understanding here—except, perhaps, that of the one or two fortunate ones of each century or so.... The ancients had some such idea when they took Eve out of Adam.”
Helena rose and went to the edge of the creek. She stood there without speaking for ten minutes, kicking stones down into the water. Then she turned about.
“I have always looked upon that sort of thing as poetical rot,” she said; “beneath the consideration of anyone of the higher order of intelligence; probably because in this country, particularly in this State, everything occult, except religion, and sometimes that, is enveloped fifteen times over in vulgar and mercenary fraud. Even well written treatises on such subjects have never interested me—my American intolerance of anything which cannot be demonstrated, I suppose. But if a man like you believes, it makes one think.”
She came and sat close beside him on the log, her gown brushing his feet.