“But there is a terrible amount of suffering in the mental growth of the race,” he continued, after a pause. “I can stand the loss of the hope and comfort in the old ideas, but I can’t stand the pain that my changed belief gives my poor old father. I could have kept still, but that seemed hardly honest. So I tried to make him understand, and he was very badly cut up.”
“And your mother?” I asked.
He had never talked about his mother. He was silent for a minute. We were on one of the great bridges over the river, and we stopped to watch the spires, the gray roofs, and the one gilded dome of the city across the shining water.
“My mother,” he said at last, taking off his hat and standing bare-headed in the cold November air, “my mother is where she understands. She died when I was a little fellow.”
Where she understands! I smiled, but the smile brought tears to my eyes. They all went back, these wise young people who had outgrown the faith of their fathers and mothers,—they all went back to it in moments of supreme emotion, and rested in it, like little children.
Naturally, I did not point out to the Lad his lack of logic. I knew that he was going to speak again of Janet, and I waited. Presently the remark came.
“Such splendid power, and all wasted! That girl could do anything that she wished to do. There is a kind of impotent idealism in her that keeps her from acting. She refuses to see the difference between the absolute and the relative. She can not, or she will not, see that if she is to have the ideal in this world she must work it out in the actual.”
“Wait,” I said. “She is young. Now she is only a question mark. But this uncertainty is a phase of her development. Something positive will grow out of the mood of denial.”
“If something could only rouse her,” said the Lad; he had forgotten that I was there,—“could sting her into life. If something could only make her care!”