I have no record of her reply. She began by saying that any actively constructive effort here helped them there, because it helped the great purpose. This was followed by a message so intimately and exquisitely his that I felt it almost a desecration to be the messenger through whom it necessarily came. He took that part of the roll away with him, and I am glad to say that twenty-four hours later no word of it remained in my memory. It was truly his.
The next night he came again, very happily. She, too, was in a lightsome mood, and while there was some serious talk, most of it was pure effervescence, frequently witty, sometimes brilliant. Unfortunately, little of this may be quoted, either because of its too personal character or because, like much amusing conversation, it was too essentially of the mood and the moment to bear translation into type.
Constantly he exclaimed at the characteristic quality of her repartee, to my great surprise. I said that I had never seen this merry side of her, and had not dreamed that it existed, to which she replied: “You never saw us when we were not in trouble—before.”
“Let me in and don’t chafe,” she told him, in one of her more serious moments, “and I can tell you much of what I see ahead. Grief, resentment, bitterness and doubt are our highest barriers. There is no cause for grief in a relation closer than your life there knows. There is no ground for resentment in the price we pay. There can be no bitterness in growth and development together—quicker growth, fuller development, than could be possible if one of us were not here. It is largely in the point of view, this thing that is called grief.”
In the course of their drifting talk he asked her how to go about starting persons who have no starting-point—“no peg to hang things on.”
“Sometimes a bomb is effective. But the fragments are not always efficient.” We laughed, and she added: “They just have to wait and grow up, Manzie dear. We learn here that our frantic haste there has been foolish. Growth must take its own time.... No, I didn’t!” I had called attention to her failure to cross a t, and she returned to it with a flourish. Several times thereafter she made a little joke by conspicuously dotting her i’s.
In the midst of one ecstatic whirl she paused to inquire: “Who ever started the foolish notion that there was no life beyond that one? Was he a philosopher, or a dyspeptic, or both?” And again, following some amusing nonsense, “You don’t think this would sound trivial to a scientific investigator, do you?”
“What’s the matter with the scientific type of mind?” he asked.
“Mostly it’s pure intellect—and life isn’t.”
During another moment of jesting he said: “I don’t think I’ll bother to walk home. I’ll just float.”