“But why?” she said with disappointment.
“I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine.”
“But why, Frederick?” she inquired, startled into wonderment.
He smiled: “If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story.”
“But why do you not wish to tell me the story?”
He answered with warning frankness: “If you once saw it as a picture, the picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life darkly.”
She protested: “If it is dark to you, why should I not share the darkness of it? Have we not always looked at life’s shadows together? And thus seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us and dark things but half as dark?”
He merely repeated his warning: “It is a story of a crueler age than ours. It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids.”
She answered: “So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to take seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from the forest worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not printed in books? Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in libraries to be read? If others read them, may not I? And since when must I begin to dread anything in books? Or anything in life? And since when did we begin to look at life apart, we who have always looked at it with four eyes?”
“I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things to see with two, and things to see with none.”