"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.
His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration and love.
Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had arrived.
"There's truth in what you say. But there's another truth, too, which you bring to my mind at this moment."
"What's that, Emile?"
"The payment that is exacted from great happiness. These intense joys of which you speak—what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably, followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."
"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"
"Of what other parent can it be the child? In my opinion those who are said to be 'born in misery' never know what real misery is. It is only those who have drunk deep of the cup of joy who can drink deep of the cup of sorrow."
Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly burst in with the vehement exclamation:
"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track? Where's the courage in avoiding the garden for fear of the swamp?"