“I wonder if you are right,” Bernardine said.  “I never meant to presume; but her indifference had exasperated me.”

“Why should you be exasperated about other people’s affairs?” he said.  “And why interfere at all?”

“Being interested is not the same as being interfering,” she replied quickly.

“It is difficult to be the one without being the other,” he said.  “It requires a genius.  There is a genius for being sympathetic as well as a genius for being good.  And geniuses are few.”

“But I knew one,” Bernardine said.  “There was a friend to whom in the first days of my trouble I turned for sympathy.  When others only irritated, she could soothe.  She had only to come into my room, and all was well with me.”

There were tears in Bernardine’s eyes as she spoke.

“Well,” said the Disagreeable Man kindly, “and where is your genius now?”

“She went away, she and hers,” Bernardine said “And that was the end of that chapter!”

“Poor little child,” he said, half to himself.  “Don’t I too know something about the ending of such a chapter?”

But Bernardine did not hear him; she was thinking of her friend.  She was thinking, as we all think, that those to whom in our suffering we turn for sympathy, become hallowed beings.  Saints they may not be; but for want of a better name, saints they are to us, gracious and lovely presences.  The great time Eternity, the great space Death, could not rob them of their saintship; for they were canonized by our bitterest tears.

She was roused from her reverie by the Disagreeable Man, who got up, and pushed his chair noisily under the table.

“Will you come and help me to develop some photographs?” he asked cheerily.  “You do not need to have a straight eye for that!”

Then as they went along together, he said: 

“When we come to think about it seriously, it is rather absurd for us to expect to have uninterrupted stretches of happiness.  Happiness falls to our share in separate detached bits; and those of us who are wise, content ourselves with these broken fragments.”

“But who is wise?” Bernardine asked.  “Why, we all expect to be happy.  No one told us that we were to be happy.  Still, though no one told us, it is the true instinct of human nature.”

“It would be interesting to know at what particular period of evolution into our present glorious types we felt that instinct for the first time,” he said.  “The sunshine must have had something to do with it.  You see how a dog throws itself down in the sunshine; the most wretched cur heaves a sigh of content then; the sulkiest cat begins to purr.”

They were standing outside the room set apart for the photograph-maniacs of the Kurhaus.

“I cannot go into that horrid little hole,” Bernardine said.  “And besides, I have promised to play chess with the Swedish professor.  And after that I am going to photograph Marie.  I promised Waerli I would.”