My brother sat gazing before him. After a moment I went on, more quietly, pleading with him. “Daniel,” I said, “you cannot ever persuade me that you must needs treat me as you have treated me since I came to this place. I came here to seek for you—for that purpose alone—and with love in my heart. And you keep me from you, you treat me as if I were not a human being!”
“Stop, Edward!” cried my brother imploringly; “do not say such things as that! Ah! what can I tell you? How can I say it to you?—it is not enough that you should be a human being.”
“Not enough!” I echoed.
“Ah! do you suppose—can you suppose—that if this thing of which we speak were mine to give—if by losing it myself I could give it to you—can you suppose I would not do it, and do it with joy? All that love could make possible I would do—how much I would do I cannot tell you. But this that you ask of me—this I cannot do!”
“You mean”—I clung to the argument with my scientific instinct—“you mean that there is in your own life, in your own mind, certain things which could be conveyed to another’s?”
“I do,” he said.
“But the use of words——” I began.
“No words could have any relation to this,” he said.
“But ideas, Daniel!” I protested. “There may be ideas in the mind for which we can find no words, but surely we can approximate them, we can foreshadow them.”
“There are some things in my mind that are not ideas,” was the quick reply.