“No, by incompleteness: one loves what could complete oneself and what one could complete; or so it seems to me.” “And as long as there are selves, will there be suffering, too?” Her eyes met his thought fearlessly. “That question, I am sure, is the basis for all the religions of cowardice, religions that deny life because of their craving for peace.” “Isn’t the craving for peace as legitimate as the craving for life?” “Nothing that denies life can be legitimate. Life is the one arbitrator. And restlessness need not mean suffering. A symphony is all restlessness--a restlessness made by difference in harmony; forgive the well-worn metaphor, but it is a good one. And, suppose that it did mean suffering, all of it. Isn’t it worth it?” Her eyes measured him, not in challenge, but quietly. “What a lover of life you are,” he said. It was like seeing him go into his house and, not hastily, but very firmly, shut the door. And as if, rather rudely, she hurled a stone at the shut door, she asked, “Do you love anything?” He smiled. “Please don’t quarrel with me.” “I wish I could make you quarrel. I suspect you of loving everything,” Eppie declared. She didn’t pursue him further on this occasion, when, indeed, he might accuse himself of having given her every chance; but on the next day, as they sat out at the edge of the birch-wood in a wonderfully warm afternoon sun, he, she, and Peter the dog (what a strange, changed echo it was), she returned, very lightly, to their discussion, tossing merely a few reconnoitering flowers in at his open window. She had never, since their remeeting, seemed to him so young. Holding a little branch of birch, she broke off and aimed bits of its bark at a tall gorse-bush near them. Peter basked, full length, in the sunlight at their feet. The day had almost the indolent quiet of summer. Eppie said, irrelevantly, for they had not been talking of that, but of people again, gossiping pleasantly, with gossip tempered to the day’s mildness: “I can’t bear the religions of peace, you see--any faith that takes the fight out of people. That Molly Carruthers I was telling you about has become a Christian Scientist, and she is in an imbecile condition of beatitude all the time. ‘Isn’t the happiness that comes of such a faith proof enough?’ she says to me. As if happiness were a proof! A drunkard is happy. Some people seem to me spiritually tipsy, and as unfit for usefulness as the drunkard. I think I distrust anything that gives a final satisfaction.” She amused him in her playing with half-apprehended thoughts. Her assurance was as light as though they were the bits of birch-bark she tossed. “You make me think a little of Nietzsche,” he said.