“They must.”
“Then you want to think deeply, to feel deeply?”
“Yes. I would rather be the central figure of a world-tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost, even if it were sorrow. My whole nature revolts against the idea of being able to feel little or nothing really. It seems to me that when we begin to feel acutely we begin to grow, like the palm tree rising towards the African sun.”
“I do not think you have ever been very unhappy,” he said. The sound of his voice as he said it made her suddenly feel as if it were true, as if she had never been utterly unhappy. Yet she had never been really happy. Africa had taught her that.
“Perhaps not,” she answered. “But—some day—”
She stopped.
“Yes, Madame?”
“Could one stay long in such a world as this and not be either intensely happy or intensely unhappy? I don’t feel as if it would be possible. Fierceness and fire beat upon one day after day and—one must learn to feel here.”
As she spoke a sensation of doubt, almost of apprehension, came to her. She was overtaken by a terror of the desert. For a moment it seemed to her that he was right, that it were better never to be the prey of any deep emotion.
“If one does not wish to feel one should never come to such a place as this,” she added.