“If they listen to you, Cave, it will be like the unlocking of a prison. At first they may go wild but then, on their own, they will find ways to life. Fear and punishment in death has seldom stopped the murderer’s hand. The only two things which hold him from his purpose are, at the worst, fear of reprisal from society and, at the best, a feeling for life, a love for all that lives ... and not the wide-smiling idiot’s love but a sense of the community of the living, of life’s marvelous regency ... even the most ignorant has felt this. Life is all while death is only the irrelevant shadow at the end, the counterpart to that instant before the seed lives.” Yes, I believed all that, all that and more too, and I felt Cave was the same as I; by removing fear with that magic of his, he would fulfill certain hopes of my own and (I flatter myself perhaps) of the long line of others, nobler than I, who had been equally engaged in attempting to use life more fully. And so that evening it welled up suddenly: the hidden conviction behind a desultory life broke through that chill hard surface of disappointment and disgust which had formed a brittle carapace about my heart. I had, after all, my truth too, and Cave had got to it, broken the shell ... and for that I shall remain grateful ... until we are at last the same, both taken by dust. Excitedly, we talked ... I talked mostly, I think. Cave was the theme and I the counterpoint or so I thought. He had stated it and I built on it, built outward from what I conceived to be the luminosity of his vision. Our dialogue was one of communion, I believed and he believed too. Only Iris guessed, even then, that it was not. She saw the difference; she was conscious of the division which that moment had, unknown to either of us, separated me from Cave. _Each time I said “life,” he said “death.”_ In true amity but false concord war began. Iris, more practical than we, deflated our visions by pulling the dialogue gently back to reality, to ways and dull means. It was agreed that we had agreed on fundamentals, that the end of fear was desirable; that superstition should be exorcised from human affairs; that the ethical systems expressed by the major religious figures from Zoroaster to Mohammed all contained useful and applicable ideas of societal behavior which need not be entirely discarded. At Iris’s suggestion, we left the problem of Christianity itself completely alone. Cave’s truth was sufficient cause for battle. There was no reason, she felt, for antagonizing the ultimate enemy at the very beginning. “Let them attack _you_, John. You must be above quarreling; you must act as if they are too much in error even to notice.” “I reckon I _am_ above it,” said Cave and he sounded almost cheerful for the first time since my arrival. “I want no trouble, but if trouble comes I don’t intend to back down. I’ll just go on saying what I know.” At midnight, Cave excused himself and went to bed.