“O Socrates!” I interrupted, “how did you learn so much in so short a time?”
“Don’t stop me,” laughed the girl. “You may never have another chance to listen to words of optimism from my lips. Listen: if we can even wonder whether love works back of all the hurt of life, aren’t we bound to act as if it were true?”
“You must found a school,” I said. “Let me be your first disciple.”
“No,” said Janet. “It has all been said a great many times, but I never understood it before. The only thing that puzzles me is the Lad.”
“That is simply fair. You puzzle him as well,” I murmured.
“His renouncement of belief in another world to work in makes him more eager to do well the work of this one. His denial of a life to be gives him an added interest in this.”
I assented, and in doing so felt that I was making a generous admission. I was usually impatient with the pseudo-scientific thought of my agnostic friends.
“But remember that positivism would have a different effect on a nature less rare,” I added by way of caution.
“There is something very beautiful in it, something fine and self-controlled, yet very sad,” said Janet, with a look of tenderness creeping into her eyes. “He so longs to find the most exquisite adjustment of this life to its ends, to make it a perfect artistic whole. And I cannot make him say, with my pet philosopher,” said the girl, looking up with one of her sweet, sudden smiles, “‘God, love, and immortality shall be, for I am!’”