“Your metaphysics may be very cheap; I know very little about them. But if all that were true, I should still say that the illusion is more real than that nothingness--for to us such a reality would be nothingness. And I should say, let us live our reality all the more intensely, since, for us, there is no other.” “How you care for life,” said Gavan, as he had said it once before. He looked at her marching through the mist like a defiant Valkyrie. “Care for it? I’ve hated it at times, the bits that came to me.” “Yet you want it, always.” “Always,” she repeated. “Always. I have passed a great part of my life in being very unhappy--that is to say, in wanting badly something I’ve not got. Yet I am more glad than I can say to have lived.” “Probably because you still expect to get what you want.” “Of course.” She smiled a little now, though a veiled, ambiguous smile. And as they began the steep descent, the mist infolding them more closely, even the semblance of the smile faded, leaving a new sadness. “Poor Gavan,” she said. He just hesitated. “Why?” “Your religion is a hatred, a distrust of life; mine is trust in it, love of it. You see it as a sort of murderous uncle, beckoning to the babes in the wood; I own that I wouldn’t stir a step to follow it if I suspected it of such a character. And I see life--“ She paused here, looking down, musing, it seemed, on what she saw, and the pause grew long. In it, suddenly, Gavan knew again the invasion of emotion. Her downcast, musing face pervaded his consciousness with that sense of trembling. “You see life as what?” he asked her, not because he wanted to know, but because her words were always less to him than her silences. Eppie, unconscious, was finding words. “As something mysterious, beautiful. Something strange, yet near, like the thought of a mother about her unborn child, but, more still, like the thought of an unborn child about its unknown mother. We are such unborn children. And this something mysterious and beautiful says: Come; through thorns, over chasms, past terrors, and in darkness. So, one goes.” Gavan was silent. Looking up at him, her eyes full of her own vision, she saw tears in his. For a moment the full benignity, sweet, austere, of a maternal thing in her rested on him, so that it might have been she who said “Come.” Then, looking away from him again, knowing that she had seen more than he had meant to show, she said, “Own that if it’s all illusion, mine’s the best to live with.” He had never seen her so beautiful as at this moment when she did not pursue, but looked away, quiet in her strength, and he answered mechanically, conscious only of that beauty, that more than beauty, alluring when it no longer pursued: “No; there are no thorns, nor chasms, nor terrors any longer for me. I am satisfied, Eppie.”