_He_. So we should sit, without words, for we would shrink from speech as too sad, and we should know swiftly the thought of the other. And when the sense of our loss became quite intolerable, we should walk on silently, in a growing horror of the eternity ahead. At last one of us, moved by some acute remembrance of our deadened selves, would go to the Master of the Spirits and, standing before him in rebellion, would say: "Cast us out as unfit for this heaven, and if Thou canst not restore us into that past state at least give us Hell, where we may suffer a common pain, instead of this passive calm and contemplation."
_She._ Yet, how short it will be! How awful to have the days and weeks and months slip by, and know that at the best there is only a reprieve of a few years. I think from this night I shall have my shadow of death. I shall always be doing things for the last time; a sad life that! And perhaps we change; as you say, we may become dead in life, prepared for a different state; and in that change we may find a new joy--a longing for perfection and peace.
_He_. That would be an acknowledgment of defeat, indeed, and that is the sad result of so much living. The world has been too hard, we cry--there is so much heartbreaking, so much misery, so few arrive! We look to another world where all that will be made right, and where we shall suffer no more.
Let the others have their opiate. You, at least, I think, are too brave for that kind of comfort. Does it not seem a little grasping to ask for eternity, because we have fifty years of action? And an eternity of passivity, because we have not done well with action? No, the world has had too much of that coddling, that kind of shuffle through, as if it were a way station where we must spend the night and make the best of sorry accommodations. Our benevolence, our warmheartedness, goes overmuch to making the beds a bit better, especially for the feeble and the sick and old, and those who come badly fitted out. We help the unfortunate to slide through: I think it would be more sensible to make it worth their while to stay. The great philanthropists are those who ennoble life, and make it a valuable possession. It would be well to poison the forlorn, hurry them post haste to some other world where they may find the conditions better suited. Then give their lot of misery and opportunity to another who can find joy in his burden.