"Don't think I'm flippant if I ask: How do these men who, in their maturity, become great spiritual forces, escape being caught young by some perceiving woman?"
"I'm not so sure the question could be put better," Bedient said. "There is often a time in the youth of men, to whom illumination comes later, when they hang divided between the need of woman and some inner austerity that commands them to go alone."
"If they disobey, does the light fail to come?" Beth asked.
"It is less likely to come. But then, often the youth of such men is spent in some great passion for an unattainable woman, a distant star for the groping years. In other cases, women have divined the mystic quality, and instead of giving themselves, have held the young visionaries pure. Again, poverty, that grim stepmother of the elect, often intervenes. And to common women—such lovers are absurd, beyond comprehension. That helps…. Illumination comes between the age of thirty and forty. After that, the way is clear. They do not grope, they see; they do not believe, they feel and know."
Beth found these things absorbing, though she accepted them only tentatively. She saw they were real to him—as bread and wool and paint.
"There is an impulse, too, among serious young men to live the life of asceticism and restraint," Bedient added. "It comes out of their very strength. This is the hasty conclusion of monasteries——"
"Hasty?"
"Well—unfledged saints fall…. Their growth becomes self-centred. The intellect expands at the expense of soul, a treacherous way that leads to the dark…. And then—a man must father his own children beautifully before he can father his race."
"That sounds unerring to me," Beth said.
"Why, it's all the Holy Spirit driving the race!" Bedient exclaimed suddenly. "You can perceive the measure of it in every man. Look at the multitude. The sexes devour each other; marriage is the vulgarest proposition of chance. Men and women want each other—that is all they know. They have no exquisite sense of selection. In them this glorious driving Energy finds no beautiful surfaces to work upon, just the passions, the meat-fed passions. Here is quantity. Nature is always ruthless with quantity, as cities are ruthless with the crowds. Here is the great waste, the tearing-down, and all that is ghastly among the masses; yet here and there from some pitiful tortured mother emerges a faltering artist—her dream."