“Very flattering!” she said in a low, pained voice.
“These ideas of yours, Vera, will bring us to disaster. But for them we should for long have been united and happy.”
“Happy for a time. And then a new driving force will appear on the scene, the stage will be cleared, and so on.”
“The responsibility is not ours. Nature has ordered it so, and rightly. Can we alter Nature, in order to live on concepts?”
“These concepts are essential principles. You have said yourself that Nature has her laws, and human beings their principles.”
“That is where the germ of disintegration lies, in that men want to formulate principles from the driving force of Nature, and thus to hamper themselves hand and foot. Love is happiness, which Nature has conferred on man. That is my view.”
“The happiness of which you speak,” said Vera, rising, “has as its complement, duty. That is my view.”
“How fantastic! Forget your duty, Vera, and acquiesce in the fact that love is a driving force of Nature, often an uncontrollable one.” Then standing up to her embraced her, saying, “Is that not so, you most obstinate, beautiful and wisest of women?”
“Yes, duty,” she said haughtily, disengaging herself. “For the years of happiness retribution will be exacted.”
“How? In making soup, nursing one another, looking at one another and pretending, in harping on principles, as we ourselves fade? If one half falls ill and retrogresses, shall the other who is strong, who hears the call of life, allow himself to be held back by duty?”
“Yes. In that case he must not listen to the calls that come to him; he must, to use Grandmother’s expression, avoid the voice as he would the brandy bottle. That is how I understand happiness.”
“Your case must be a bad one if it has to be bolstered up by quotations from your Grandmother’s wisdom. Tell me how firmly your principles are rooted.”
“I will go to her to-day direct from here.”
“To tell her what there is between us, all that she does not know,” she said, sitting down on the bench again.
“You don’t understand, because you don’t know what duty means. I have been guilty before her for a long time.”
“That is the morality which smothers life with mould and dulness. Vera, Vera, you don’t love, you do not know how!”