All through the winter, against the dark background of my new knowledge of evil, I had seen him, strong in body and alert in mind, with a heart like the heart of a little child. Often, in thinking of him, I had said: “God now and then sends a man into the world who stands as a promise to the race.”
I thought of Janet, and I cried out to know the meaning of the world’s great waste of human pain.
The Altruist explained it all to me the next day.
He came to ask me to visit Janet. I had not dared to go. He was surprised and grieved by my mood.
“The meaning of this sorrow is very clear,” he said gently, with the old ecstatic gleam in his eyes.
“You explained everything very differently a few weeks ago,” I said rebelliously, when he had finished. “You told me then, and I believed you, that God was leading that girl out of her mental tangles into simple human happiness.”
“Did I?” said the Altruist, dreamily. “It all looks different to me now.”
“I can see that it does,” I retorted in anger.
“The shock will carry Janet out of her old, cheap pessimism into conviction and into action of some kind. She will merge her individual experience in the general life. She will lose herself in great ideas. Now, at the crisis of so many great questions, she will find her work. I can see a career for her infinitely more lofty than she could have had if this sad event had not occurred.”
Here the Doctor entered, interrupting the words of prophecy.