But in the sad silence, he and the lady were perhaps drifting further and further apart!

“I did not mean,” he said, plunging into what came first, “that I could not enjoy verse of the kind you prefer—­as verse.  I took the matter by the more serious handle, because, evidently, you accepted the tone and the scope of it.  I have a weakness for honesty.”

“There is something not right about you, though, Mr. Faber—­if I could find it out,” said Miss Meredith.  “You can not mean you enjoy any thing you do not believe in?”

“Surely there are many things one can enjoy without believing in them?”

“On the contrary, it seems to me that enjoying a thing is only another word for believing in it.  If I thought the sweetest air on the violin had no truth in it, I could not listen to it a moment longer.”

“Of course the air has all the truth it pretends to—­the truth, that is, of the relations of sounds and of intervals—­also, of course, the truth of its relation as a whole to that creative something in the human mind which gave birth to it.”

“That is not all it pretends.  It pretends that the something it gives birth to in the human mind is also a true thing.”

“Is there not then another way also, in which the violin may be said to be true?  Its tone throughout is of suffering:  does it not mourn that neither what gives rise to it, nor what it gives rise to, is any thing but a lovely vapor—­the phantom of an existence not to be lived, only to be dreamed?  Does it not mourn that a man, though necessarily in harmony with the laws under which he lives, yet can not be sufficiently conscious of that harmony to keep him from straining after his dream?”

“Ah!” said Miss Meredith, “then there is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand!”

“There is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand,” said the doctor, with mingled assent and assertion.  “Hence it is forever falling.”

“But it is forever renewed,” she objected.

“With what renewal?” rejoined Faber.  “What return is there from the jaws of death?  The individual is gone.  A new consciousness is not a renewal of consciousness.”

She looked at him keenly.

“It is hard, is it not?” she said.

“I will not deny that in certain moods it looks so,” he answered.

She did not perceive his drift, and was feeling after it.

“Surely,” she said, “the thing that ought to be, is the thing that must be.”

“How can we tell that?” he returned.  “What do we see like it in nature?  Whatever lives and thrives—­animal or vegetable—­or human—­it is all one—­every thing that lives and thrives, is forever living and thriving on the loss, the defeat, the death of another.  There is no unity save absolutely by means of destruction.  Destruction is indeed the very center and framework of the sole existing unity.  I will not, therefore, as some do, call Nature cruel:  what right have