“We have no gods,” he said. “We have lost the old one. We have won no new ones.” He smiled with the same hard half-parted lips. “I am not sure that we were so very wise. All the searing and desecrating vision that Father gave us of this reality was mere preparation for his Faith. He and his kind helped desecrate the world in order to enjoy their heaven. Without his heaven, is this reality he gave us altogether truth? Where are we with it? What is an abortion in relation with a life that is fully born? We rebelled; we left him and his blows and his hell and his God. We took with us the corroding poison of his blood. Were we not fools, Cornelia?” “But, Tom, what else could we have done?” “Nothing, of course.” “Then, perhaps----” “Be brave and honest, for once! A little more like father. His souls in hell could also not have done otherwise....” “Tom! I won’t believe....” He cut her short. “Very well, then: what _will_ you believe?” She was silenced. His smile was over her, a hateful bitter triumph. “That is it, precisely. Don’t you see? What _will_ we believe, Cornelia?” He came and lifted her out of her chair. They sat down on the couch. His hand was very gentle on hers. He kissed her. “We are neither the old nor the new, Sister. I sometimes think we are nothing. We are not happy. We are not strong. We have no gods at all.” “We are unhappy, Tom.” He looked at her fiercely. “Are we that?” he asked her. “Have we the strength to be unhappy? To remain unhappy? Oh, how I wish I could believe that!” He was grasping both her wrists. He dropped them. “No,” he said. “It’s a lie. We are nothing. We are not even martyrs. I with my Law--my successful rotten Law. You with your paltry, remunerative Art! We are on the way. Something is on the way, through us, perhaps, through the wilderness of life. We are they who shall fall by the wayside.” He looked over his shoulder, out of the window. The night was a blue haze, deep and far. It was streaked with the murmur of men, with the glow of a million lights. A tremor ran through him like the pulse of blood, and came about them, seated in the room. “Let us face that, Cornelia....” “But Tom:--in what you said--that is faith of a sort. You spoke of a wilderness to go through. Of a way. It must lead somewhere. There must be something else?” “For us?” “Perhaps not for us.” “I should like,” Tom pondered, “to have some Church in which to perform a service for my father.” She looked at him close. His head was down. She took his face in her hands and touched his shut eyes with her lips. “Dear Tom! Don’t I help?” There was a great hope in her. If she could find him again: hold him again! Tom, her first child.... He was searching her with eyes her lips had opened.