To understand life, and love it to its depths in a living being, that is the being’s task, and that his masterpiece; and each of us can hardly occupy his time so greatly as with one other; we have only one true neighbor down here.

To live is to be happy to live.  The usefulness of life—­ah! its expansion has not the mystic shapes we vainly dreamed of when we were paralyzed by youth.  Rather has it a shape of anxiety, of shuddering, of pain and glory.  Our heart is not made for the abstract formula of happiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either.  It beats for emotion and not for peace.  Such is the gravity of the truth.

“You’ve done well to say all that!  Yes, it is always easy to lie for a moment.  You might have lied, but it would have been worse when we woke up from the lies.  It’s a reward to talk.  Perhaps it’s the only reward there is.”

She said that profoundly, right to the bottom of my heart.  Now she is helping me, and together we make the great searchings of those who are too much in the right.  Marie’s assent is so complete that it is unexpected and tragic.

“I was like a statue, because of the forgetting and the grief.  You have given me life, you have changed me into a woman.”

“I was turning towards the church,” she goes on; “you hardly believe in God so much when you’ve no need of Him.  When you’re without anything, you can easily believe in Him.  But now, I don’t want any longer.”

Thus speaks Marie.  Only the idolatrous and the weak have need of illusion as of a remedy.  The rest only need see and speak.

She smiles, vague as an angel, hovering in the purity of the evening between light and darkness.  I am so near to her that I must kneel to be nearer still.  I kiss her wet face and soft lips, holding her hand in both of mine.

Yes, there is a Divinity, one from which we must never turn aside for the guidance of our huge inward life and of the share we have as well in the life of all men.  It is called the truth.

THE END