“I always expected some great discovery from Professor Mora,” he said, folding his arms and looking far away to the western mountains. “At first I thought that it would be in physics. But I soon found that he looked through, rather than at, natural objects and phenomena. Visible nature was to him the screen which hid the object of his search. I recollect walking home with him one day in Paris after we had listened to a lecture on electricity from a famous scientist. ‘What does electricity mean?’ your grandfather exclaimed. He held that the greatest obstacle to the discovery of truth is the insincerity of man.
“I liked the same studies that interested him, though my proficiency in them was small; and when I saw the way he went, I hoped that he would set the seal of his guess, at least, on some grand eclectic plan of creation toward which my lighter fancy spun blindly its filmy threads. That terrible ‘I do not know’ of his was crushing! But later I learned to be thankful for one man who searched far into psychical and theological problems, yet spared the race a new theory.”
Tacita listened with pleasure to his dreamy talk. And she told him of the recitation she had heard the week before.
“That flowery nook, with its larks, is to-day what it was when Basil laid him down there to die,” he said. “The mountain is excavated in halls that concentrate like the spokes of a wheel, with a column left solid in the centre. The hollow called Basil’s Rest may be called the upper hub. The lower one is in the centre of the earth. There’s a narrow stair goes up on the outside.”
When Tacita went down, she saw Iona coming toward her, seemingly quite restored to health. Her cheeks were crimson, her eyes sparkling.
“I feel better,” she said. “Let us go to the Star-terrace for a view of the sunset.”
They went, and she pointed out effects of shadow in the western mountains and of colors in the eastern.
“I have sometimes an impulse to go out into the world again,” she said then, abruptly. “When I was there, it was during my silence. I was there to study, not to talk. When we first go out, especially the young, we are held to a period of silence as to decisions, opinions, wishes, and plans. Obeying, we save ourselves trouble and avoid a good deal of foolishness. The story of Sisyphus is impressed on us as that of one whose first years are spent in a foolish effort and his last years in repenting of it.
“The only opinion we express from the first and at all ages is that touching our faith. A child may reprove a blasphemer, or assert its devotion to Christ in the hearing of one who expresses doubt. One subject after another is freed for us, as we learn what the world means by it. Of course, for a person of vivacious temper and strong feelings to remain silent, or to say always, ‘I do not know,’ gives full employment to the will and the nerves. I used sometimes to feel as though I should burst.
“Now, if I should go, it would be to speak when occasion calls, and to act in accordance with my speech. I could call a falsehood a falsehood, and a wrong a wrong.”