"We have only this little life, and that being so, ought we not to snatch, as a matter of duty, anything that will make this life happy? Let me put a common case to you. I knew a lad who was doomed to die between twenty and thirty. He was the victim of an hereditary disease. A year before he died, and knowing that he would die, he married the girl he loved. People called it a crime, but to me it was his only chance of happiness, and he seized it. Was he not right?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Some people are handicapped, Mr. Erskine. They are born into the world with limitations, kinks in their characters, and a host of wild longings—things which make life a tragedy. They cannot obtain happiness in the way ordinary people do. Why, then, is it wrong for them to try and snatch at the happiness they can get?"
"That sounds all right," I said, "only I doubt the happiness."
"Napoleon broke through conventional barriers," she urged. "He said he could not be governed by ordinary laws."
"Exactly," I replied. "But then, for one thing, Napoleon was a genius, and, for another, his great career ended in a fiasco."
"Yes; but if being a genius justifies breaking away from the established order of things, do not peculiar limitations also justify it? Do not abnormalities of any sort justify extraordinary measures? If there is a God, Mr. Erskine, we are as God made us, and surely He does not give us life to mock us?"
"The worst of it is that facts laugh at us. As far as I can discover, nearly all these experiments end in bitter failure. It is by abiding by the common laws of life that we find what measure of happiness there is."
"If I were sure there was a God and a future life I think I could agree with you," was her reply.
"And you are not?"