"And its terror is the true terror—mental. How the papers will hate it, and how every one will read it!"
"May it—may it not do a great deal of harm?" said Catherine, slowly.
"What if it does? Nothing can prevent it from being a great book."
And he broke out into a dissertation on art that would have delighted Mr. Ardagh.
Catherine listened to him in silence, but when he had finished she said,
"But you are one-sided, Mr. Berrand."
"I!" he cried. "How so?"
"You see only the horrible in life, even in love. You care only for the horrible in art."
"The truth is more often horrible than not," he answered. "We dress it in pink paper as we dress a burning lamp. We fear its light will hurt our weak eyes. Almost all the pretty theories of future states, happy hunting grounds, and so forth, almost all the fallacies of life to which we are inclined to cling, are only pink paper shades which we make to save ourselves from blinking at the light."
"You call it light?" she said.