"Perhaps you can attain this ideal, but I cannot."
"I can understand," said Mathilde with a slight blush. "I can understand an instant of aberration, a sudden and unforeseen fall; but I have no sympathy with the profanation of conscience by a designing woman. She who has pressed two men to her bosom, becomes afterward like an inn open to all. One only! only one for life and death!"
"And that only one, Henri!"
"No, it is not he! It is you, Jacob; he has only my body, you have my soul."
After a moment of exaltation she continued:--
"Tell me," said she, "do you really believe in the immortality of the soul and a life beyond the tomb?"
"Yes, I believe it. Otherwise man would have been an aspiration that God would not have realized. How else can we account for the desire for immortality that each one bears within his soul? Why should we suppose that this presentiment, this divination of a future existence, should be an illusion? As to the conditions of the future life we are ignorant. Man dreams that he will awaken the same as when he closes his eyes here below. That is perhaps an error; but one sure thing is, that the soul will not lose acquired virtues nor the reward for suffering, courageously endured. Certainly there is another world."
"You throw balm on my spirit; I desire to believe, but it is in vain that I search for faith in books. They puzzle me, and I always end by being confirmed in an ignorance which can be expressed in these words: I know nothing."
"Yes; but one does not draw faith from books, it proceeds from an inner voice."
"But this uncertainty; everywhere this dreadful uncertainty. Virtue, science, reason itself are so many spider webs which are torn by every wind. Yet it is frightful to die with this idea of annihilation in one's heart."