“You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown,” said I.
“It’s the same thing,” she retorted. And then taking up her parable, she told me in her artless way the inner history of her heart since that morning; but what she said is sacred. Also, a man feels himself to be a pitiful dog of a god when a woman relates how she came to establish him on her High Altar.
Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the enchantment of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.
“It seems, my dear,” said I, “that we have got to Nephelococcygia after all.”
“What is Nephelococcygia?” asked Carlotta.
I relented. “It’s a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city,” said I.
Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of horror has sprung an everlasting love. Many a man will say that in all my relations with Carlotta I have comported myself as a fool, and that my marriage is the crowning folly. Well, I pretend not unto wisdom. Wisdom would have married me to five thousand a year, a position in fashionable society, my Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to eternal destruction. I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly. Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life, that with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved nothing. I once thought so. I boasted of it in my diary when I complacently styled myself a waster in Earth’s factory. Oh, that diary! Let me here solemnly retract and abjure every crude and idiot opinion and reflection of life set forth in that frenetic record! I regard myself not as a waster—I remember a passage in Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence:
“For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God? If then I were a nightingale I would do the part of a nightingale: if I were a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational creature and I ought to praise God; this is my work, I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song.”
No, I am neither nightingale nor swan, and cannot add, as they do, to the beauty of the earth. The lame old man has his limitations; but within them, he can, by cleaving to his post and praising God, fulfil his destiny.
Carlotta coming onto the housetop to summon me to lunch looks over my shoulder as I write these words.