“Don’t you think,” asked Ruth, “that it is a superior feeling, though; a cold, perfect feeling?”
“No,” I answered; “though it lifts us above petty concern for ourselves, it does not lift us out of sympathy and action.”
Henry said: “When I go to Riverside and see all the lights, and think of the millions of people, I feel them all.”
It reminded me of the day Marian had said she felt so when she thought of all the windows and rooms in all the apartment houses.
“Suppose,” I asked, “that you had failed in a very important examination, Henry, would you feel bad?”
“Yes,” he said, “if it were a very, very important one.”
“Then, if you went to Riverside Drive and forgot yourself in that immense feeling, when you returned home you would not only be over your sore, bitter disappointment, but you would be full of energy to begin work again.”
“Yes,” he answered, “I would.”
“So, you see, it is a creative, sympathetic, living aloofness, not cold and far off.”
We put down for the seventh law: