The young women began to laugh. All three were now on the same side of the table, and, as they leaned over their scented harvest, murmuring like bees, stirring like lilies where the wind passes, one did not know if they were listening to the words of the master or to the words of the flowers.
This spectacle helped to reassure me, after my friend's sayings, which, however, I did not understand.
HE
The religious conception of the world that you now have, the conception that you call Christian, from the name that was given me on the occasion of one of my earthly visits, is one of the feeblest that humanity has ever imagined. Practical intelligence has, in a certain sense, made progress since the Greek philosophers before Socrates, but speculative intelligence has almost consistently gone backward. To make a system that should have some distant relation to the truth, the cinematic philosophy of Epicurus would have to be poured into the fables of pagan mythology. Take, if you like, if Latin thought is more familiar to you, the poem of Lucretius, and Ovid's "Metamorphoses"; attempt an interpretation which should derive part from universal determinism, and part from divine caprice.... It is difficult? Why? Are not men apt in appearance to initiative, though ruled, as you know, and very narrowly, by fatal physical laws? You are free, when you think yourselves free. It is the same with the gods, but the liberty of the gods is exercised on a very much more extensive material, a material which, without being infinite (infinity does not exist), is immense. Their power, superior though it is, is of the same order as human power. Greece touched the knot of the question, and, if she did not untie it, it is that it is not to be untied: the creator of the world, the regulator of the world, is Destiny. Fatality rules over the gods, as the gods rule over men, and under her hand, my friend, we are all equal, exactly as you are under death, genii, kings, and beggars alike.
To dissimulate the trouble into which these words threw me, I turned towards the young women. There were but two of them.
SHE
The little one has gone off to look for more flowers. Some of them fade so quickly. One would say that the warmth of the earth is enough to dry them up.
THE OTHER
How many times love has been killed by kisses.
I