“And yet ... you might think of them as happy, living that way.”
“Good gracious! Happy?”
“They needn’t care about how they are to be provided for—and they have their duties.”
“But they’re prisoners, Sylvia!”
“Yes, prisoners.... Aren’t we all prisoners, somehow? I’ve sometimes thought that none of us can do just what we’d like to do, or come or go freely. We think we’re free, as oxen in a treadmill think of themselves as being free, I suppose. We think we’re climbing a long hill, and that we’ll get to the top after a while. But at sundown the gate is opened and the oxen are released. They’ve never really gotten anywhere.”
He turned to her with the stanch optimism she had grown accustomed to in him. “A pagan doctrine, that,” he said spiritedly.
“A pagan doctrine.... I wonder what that means.”
“Pagans are people who don’t believe in God. I am not speaking of the God of the churches, exactly. I mean a good influence.”
“Don’t they believe in their own gods?”
“No doubt. But you might call their own gods bad influences, as often as not.”