‘What, for instance? Golden paving-stones, eternal sunshine, and singing angels!’
‘Oh, not necessarily just those things. They’re merely symbolical.’
‘At least,’ said Sybert, ‘perfect peace and beauty and happiness, and nothing beyond. You needn’t tell me, Miss Marcia, that you want to spend an eternity in any such place as that. It might do for a vacation—a villeggiatura—but for ever!’
‘Probably angels’ ideas of happiness are more settled than men’s.’
‘In that case angels must be infinitely lower than men. To be happy in a place that has reached the end, that stands still, would require a very selfish man—and I don’t see why not a very selfish angel—to settle down contentedly to an eternity of bliss while there’s still so much work to be done in the world.’
‘I suppose,’ she suggested, ‘that when you get to be an angel, you forget about the world and leave all the sorrow and misery behind.’
‘A fools’ paradise!’ he maintained.
They were suddenly aroused from their talk by a peal of thunder. They looked up to see that the sun had disappeared. Sybert’s small cloud on the horizon had grown until it covered the sky.
‘Well, Miss Marcia,’ he laughed, ‘I am afraid we are going to get a wetting to pay for our immersion in philosophy and art. Shall we turn back?’
‘If we’re going to get wet anyway,’ she said, ‘I should prefer seeing the monastery first, since we’ve come so far.’ She looked across the valley in front of them, where, not half a mile away, the walls rose grim and gaunt amid a cluster of cypresses.