We went up by a sloping path between pear-trees, and reached the vestibule of the house. From afar we heard the sound of the stage-coach bells; a headlight gleamed, and we saw it pass by and afterwards disappear among the trees. “What a mistake to ask more of life than it can give!” suddenly exclaimed Laura. “The sky, the sun, conversation, love, the fields, works of art... think of looking on all these as a bore, from which one desires to escape through some violent occupation, so as to have the satisfaction of not noticing that one is alive.”
“Because noticing that one is alive is disagreeable,” replied her brother.
“And why?”
“The idea! Why? Because life is not an idyll, not by a good deal. We live by killing, destroying everything there is around us; we get to be something by ridding ourselves of our enemies. We are in a constant struggle.”
“I don’t see this struggle. Formerly, when men were savages, perhaps.... But now!”
“Now, just the same. The one difference is that the material struggle, with the muscles, has been changed to an intellectual one, a social one. Nowadays, it is evident, a man does not have to hunt the bull or the wild boar in the prairies; he finds their dead bodies at the butcher’s. Neither does the modern citizen have to knock his rival down to overcome him; nowadays the enemy is conquered at the desk, in the factory, in the editor’s office, in the laboratory.... The struggle is just as infuriated and violent as it was in the depths of the forests, only it is colder and more courteous in form.”
“I don’t believe it. You won’t convince me.”
Laura plucked a branch of white blossoms from a wild-rose bush and put it into her bosom.
“Well, Cæsar, let us go to the hotel,” she said; “it is very late.”
“I will escort you a little way,” I suggested.