"And don't I, then?"
"I don't want to live my life asleep all the time, do you hear?"
"What a strange little woman-thing you are! There's a time for kissing, and a time for everything, you babe!"
"Life is what I long for!" she cried, trembling with the uncertainty of what it was she wanted.
"Life? Love is life!"
"No, no! To understand--that is life. If I join my life to yours, I want to be alive, and not dead and dumb as my mother was."
"You have queer notions. Do you suppose, then, that people can learn how to think as they learn any other trade f I tell you, what you've got to do is to love life--I'll make it my business to see that you love it!"
"I shouldn't like to be cast off," she said with a kind of bitterness, "when you thought I was no longer beautiful. I should run away from you if you deceived me and were no longer my friend."
"All right," he said, laughing. So they walked along close together, and he kept his arm tightly about her waist. "Bound," he said, "you will walk more freely and happily than unbound. Everything is not what it seems to be. You catch sight of a thought or a feeling, and you imagine it is as simple and as limited as a point. You come closer to it, and you find it grows, it turns into a garden with all sorts of walks and labyrinths. You walk about in it and are astonished. Then under your very feet it changes to a wilderness full of precipices and impenetrable thickets. The wilderness grows to a world, which you can never see the whole of and never come to the end of. All things are included in this world, all things and everything.
"It is very much less trouble to take things as simply and smoothly as most people do than to try to move huge blocks of thought. Thinking is like drinking--a man easily falls into it, if the shoe pinches anywhere. And what does he get out of it? An endless struggle with headaches. He's got to be a hero to keep it up. Do you think you'd ever get used to drinking?"