“After all, Palairet isn’t a Hindoo. One expects something more normal from a white man.” His odd penetration was hurting her, but she laughed at his complacent Anglo-Saxondom. “If you want a white man, what do you make of the one who wrote the Imitation?” “Make of him? Nothing. Nor any one else, I fancy. What does your young Palairet do?” Grainger brought the subject firmly back from her digression. Eppie was sitting in the window-seat, and, leaning her head back, framed in an arabesque of creepers, she now owned, after a little pause, and as if with a weariness of evasion she was willing to let him see as she did: “Nothing, really.” “Does he care about anything?” Grainger placed himself opposite her, folding his arms with an air of determined inquiry. And again Eppie owned, “He believes in nothing, so how can he care?” “Believes in nothing? What do you mean by that?” “Well,” with a real sense of amusement over the inner icy weight, she was ready to put it in its crudest, most inclusive terms, “he doesn’t believe in immortality.” Grainger stared, taken aback by the ingenuous avowal. “Immortality? No more do I,” he retorted. “Oh, yes, you do,” said Eppie, looking not at him but out at the summer sky. “You believe in life and so you do believe in immortality, even though you don’t know that you do. You are, like most energetic people, too much preoccupied with living to know what your life means, that’s all.” “My dear child,”--Grainger was fond of this form of appellation, an outlet for the pent-up forces of his baffled tenderness,--“any one who is alive finds life worth while without a Paradise to complete it, and any one who isn’t a coward doesn’t turn from it because it’s also unhappy.” “If you think that Gavan does that you mistake the very essence of his skepticism, or, if you like to call it so, of his faith. It’s not because he finds it unhappy that he turns from it, but because he finds it meaningless.” “Meaningless?--a place where one can work, achieve, love, suffer?” Grainger jerked out the words from an underlying growl of protest. Eppie now looked from the sky to him, her unconscious ally. “Dear old Jim, I like to hear you. You’ve got it, all. Every word you say implies immortality. It’s all a question of being conscious of one’s real needs and then of trusting them.” “Life, here, now, could satisfy my needs,” he said. She kept her eyes on his, at this, for a grave moment, letting it have its full stress as she took it up with, “Could it? With death at the end of it?” and without waiting for his answer she passed from the personal moment. “You said that life was worth while, and you meant, I suppose, that it was worth while because we were capable of making it good rather than evil.” “Well, of course,” said Grainger. “And a real choice between good and evil is only possible to a real identity, you’ll own?”