She was silent, self-convicted; for she had taken chaff! …Nevertheless, it was not dead within her—the self. It cried out under Renault's pitiless scorn for satisfaction, for life. The rebellious surge of desire still suffocated her at times. There was beauty, the loveliness of the earth, the magic wonder of music and art,—all the clamor of emotion for an expression of self. And love? Ah, that was dead for her. But the life within, the self, still hungered for possession at times more fiercely than ever. Why should it be killed at her age? Why were they not good, these hungry desires, this fierce self that beat in her blood for recognition? The conquering, achieving SELF! That was the spirit of her race, to see and take that which was good in their eyes, to feed the SELF with all that the world contained of emotions, ideas, experience; to be big, and strong, and rich,—to have Power! That was what life had meant for her ancestors ever since the blond race emerged from their forests to conquer. All else was death to the self, was merely sentimental deception, a playing at resignation….
As if he traced her fast thoughts, Renault said:—
"A house divided against itself—"
"But even if I have failed—"
"Failed because you did not look deep enough within!"
Renault's voice insensibly softened from his tone of harsh invective as he added:—
"And now you know what I meant when I said that a neurasthenic world needed a new religion!"
So he had remembered her,—knew her all the time!
"But you can't get it because you need it—"
"Yes, because you feel the need! … Not the old religion of abnegation, the impossible myths that come to us out of the pessimistic East, created for a relief, a soporific, a means of evasion,—I do not mean that as religion. But another faith, which abides in each one of us, if we look for it. We rise with it in the morning. It is a faith in life apart from our own personal fate…. Because we live on the surface, we despair, we get sick. Look below into the sustaining depths beyond desire, beyond self, to the depths,—and you will find it. It will uplift you…. When you wake in the morning, there will come to you some mysterious power that was not there before, some belief, some hope, some faith. Grasp it! … When the clouds lift, the physical clouds and the mental clouds, then appears the Vision and the knowledge. They are the truth from the depths within,—the voice of the spirit that lives always. And by that voice man himself lives or dies, as he wills,—by the voice of the spirit within."