I liked her new ideas because they made her happy. Intrinsically they were better than the old ones. But I fear that I should have liked any thought of hers that made her face look like that. There was a light in it that I had never seen before.
“I think,” she said, looking up at me wistfully, “that all the sickening sense I had of defeat—defeat before the battle—was because I stood waiting for a voice from heaven to tell me what the outcome was to be. I forgot that the voice must speak through my own lips.”
“Isn’t your new gospel of action very much like the Lad’s?” I insinuated.
“I suppose it is,” said Janet, slowly; “and yet, and yet the Lad is a positivist. He insists that the present world is the limit of all our knowledge, perhaps of all our action.”
“And you do not?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl. “I sometimes wonder if the will to be and to be good cannot rule in another world as well as in this. Perhaps the will needs another world to realize the hope of this.”
“Won’t you explain?” I begged meekly. I sometimes find it difficult to understand the wisdom of the young.
“I mean,” she said, “that we speak of God and love and immortality, and ask if our ideas can be true. But God and love and immortality are not to be had for the asking. They are true in so far as we make them true.”
“So you have solved the problem of the Sphinx?” I said. “It is a good solution; that is, as good as any mere thought about life can be.”
“I suppose,” continued Janet, “that we are bound to answer back in act to every question we can ask. We must rise to the level of our loftiest inquiry. The first suspicion we get of immortality makes us responsible for it. Henceforth we must win it for ourselves.”