Gabriel smiled at her, a lover’s smile.
“And once I doubted whether happiness could be found,” he said, “but now—”
“But now?” she asked.
“In a good woman’s love man comes near heaven. Give me simplicity: a quiet home, no matter how humble it may be, books, a few honest friends, some poor whom I may help.”
“Ah!” Joan said, “the city taught us that.”
“Vast Babel where every soul’s cry clashes. God, how my heart sickened in that place, where men scramble like swine over an unclean trough, gnashing against each other, wounding that they may live. Oh, material necessity, base need of gold! Happy are they who strive not but are content.”
The sun sank low behind the trees and the east was purpled with the night. So great was the silence that the very dew seemed to murmur as it fell from out the heavens. The utter azure was untroubled by a cloud; the windless west stood a vast sheet of gold.
“Have we not learned our lesson,” said the man—“to trust and labor and aspire?”
“Ah, Gabriel,” she answered, “to stand aside from those who bicker and deride, from those who stab their rivals with a lie, defaming truth in securing their own ends.”
“Yet, lest we forget—”