“Oh, there are a thousand years between fifteen and twenty-one. I am quite another person, as you see.”
“You are merely an extraordinary child developed; and you have carried your memory along with you.”
“Oh, yes, the memory is there, and the tablets are pretty full; but never mind me. I want to know if your ideals are as strong now as I am sure they were then—if any one in this world manages to hold onto his ideals when circumstances don’t happen to coddle them.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t thought much about them since that night. I doubt if I’d given too much thought to them before. Deep in every man’s brain is an ideal of some sort, I imagine, but it is seldom he sits down and analyses it out. He knows when he’s missed it and locked the gates behind him, and perhaps, occasionally, he knows when he’s found it—or something approximating it. We are all the victims of that terrible thing called Imagination, which, I sometimes think, is the sudden incursion of a satirical Deity. I have not married—why, I can hardly say. Perhaps because there has been some vague idea that if I waited long enough I might meet the one woman; but partly, also, because I have had no very great desire to marry. I keep bachelor’s hall over on the Sound, and the life is very jolly and free of small domestic details. There are so many women that give you almost everything you want—or at least four or five will make up a very good whole—that I have never yet faced the tremendous proposition of going through life expecting one woman to give me everything my nature and mind demand. But there are such women, I imagine,” he added abruptly, trying to see her face in one of the occasional splashes of moonlight.
“A very clever woman—Mrs. Lafarge; perhaps you know her—said to me the other day, that many men and women of strong affinity took a good deal of spirituality with them into marriage, but soon forgot all about it—matrimony is so full of reiterant details, and everything becomes so matter of course. Do you think that is true?”
“I am afraid it is. The imagination wears blunt. The Deity is sending his electricity elsewhere—to those still prowling about the shores of the unknown. Perhaps if one could keep the danger in mind—if one were unusually clever—I don’t know. I fancy civilisation will get to that point after a while. Unquestionably the companionship of man and woman, when no essentials are lacking, is the one supremely satisfying thing in life. If we loved each other, for instance—on such a night—it seems to me that we are in tune—”
“But we don’t love each other, as it happens, and we met about three quarters of an hour ago. We’ll probably hate each other by daylight.”
“Oh, I hope not,” he said, accepting the ice-water. “But tell me what your ideals were. I hope they have proved more stable than mine.”
“Oh, mine were a sort of yearning for some unseen force in nature; I suppose the large general force from which love is a projection. Every mortal, except the purely material, the Beverly Peele type, for instance, has an affinity with something in the invisible world, an uplifting of the soul. Christianity satisfies the great mass, hence its extraordinary hold. Do you suppose the real link between the soul of man and the soul of nature will ever be established?”
He laughed a little, piqued, but amused. “You are very clever,” he said, “and this is just the hour and these are just the circumstances for impersonal abstractions. Well—perhaps the link will be established when we have lived down this civilisation and entered upon another which has had drilled out of it all the elements which plant in human nature the instincts of cupidity and sordidness and envy and political corruption, and all that goes to make us the aliens from nature that we are. About all that keeps us in touch with her now are our large vices. There is some tremendous spiritual force in the Universe which projects itself into us, making man and nature correlative. What wonder that man—particularly an imaginative and intelligent child—should be affected and played upon by this Mystery? What wonder that the heathens have gods, and the civilised a symbol called the Lord God?—a concrete something which they can worship, and upon which unburden the load of spirituality which becomes oppressive to matter? It is for the same reason that women fall in love and marry earlier than men, who have so many safety-valves. On the other hand, men who have a great deal of emotional imagination and who can neither love nor accept religion take refuge in excess. It is all a matter of temperament. Cold-blooded people—those that have received a meagre share of this great vital force pervading the Universe, which throws a continent into convulsions or a human being into ecstasy—such, for instance, are religious only because their ancestors were,—their brain is pointed that way. Their blood has nothing to do with it, as is the more general case—for Christianity is pre-eminently sensuous.”