“You haven’t had a great deal of experience of that kind, have you?” asked the Doctor.
She did not listen. “The world is buttoned up wrong,” she said, “just one hole wrong. I get what you want, and somebody else wants what you get. I believe that hopes were given to us simply in order to hurt. The gods must enjoy dangling before our eyes, just out of reach, the things we pray for. Probably they like to see us clutching the air.”
“Do you know how to ride a horse?” asked the Doctor.
“Yes.”
“Then you had better do it, and let the gods alone. There is one good thing about being on horseback: you can’t despair. If you do, you fall off.”
Here we reached my door, and I went in. I paused for a minute, to watch the two women going down the street,—the Doctor, with her free, even step; the girl with quick, irregular movements.
It seemed to me that Janet was the most inexplicable of all the inexplicable people I had met since my arrival, six weeks ago. Something must have hurt her cruelly. She saw all life in the light of her own pain, and she rebelled against the suffering whose ultimate meaning she could not understand.
Yet now, with the sunlight in her warm brown hair, she looked, in her radiant colouring, like a symbol of all the joy and gladness in the world.
CHAPTER II
I had come to a strange city, to do a peculiar work. At last—and I was thirty-nine years old—I was free to render humanity the service I had always wanted to give.