"If life were not a moment, the whole of history
would seem like the happening of a day.... Yes--we shall pass. And the
city will pass, and all the things that are to come. Man and the Overman
and wonders unspeakable. And yet ..."

He paused, and then began afresh. "I know what you feel. At least I
fancy.... Down there one thinks of one's work, one's little vexations
and pleasures, one's eating and drinking and ease and pain. One lives,
and one must die. Down there and everyday--our sorrow seemed the end of
life....

"Up here it is different. For instance, down there it would seem
impossible almost to go on living if one were horribly disfigured,
horribly crippled, disgraced. Up here--under these stars--none of those
things would matter. They don't matter.... They are a part of something.
One seems just to touch that something--under the stars...."

He stopped. The vague, impalpable things in his mind, cloudy emotions
half shaped towards ideas, vanished before the rough grasp of words. "It
is hard to express," he said lamely.

They sat through a long stillness.

"It is well to come here," he said at last. "We stop--our minds are very
finite. After all we are just poor animals rising out of the brute, each
with a mind, the poor beginning of a mind. We are so stupid. So much
hurts. And yet ...

"I know, I know--and some day we shall _see_.

"All this frightful stress, all this discord will resolve to harmony,
and we shall know it. Nothing is but it makes for that. Nothing. All the
failures--every little thing makes for that harmony. Everything is
necessary to it, we shall find. We shall find. Nothing, not even the
most dreadful thing, could be left out. Not even the most trivial.
Every tap of your hammer on the brass, every moment of work, my idleness
even ... Dear one! every movement of our poor little one ... All these
things go on for ever. And the faint impalpable things. We, sitting here
together.--Everything ...

"The passion that joined us, and what has come since. It is not passion
now. More than anything else it is sorrow. _Dear_ ..."

He could say no more, could follow his thoughts no further.

Elizabeth made no answer--she was very still; but presently her hand
sought his and found it.

IV--UNDERNEATH

Under the stars one may reach upward and touch resignation, whatever the
evil thing may be, but in the heat and stress of the day's work we lapse
again, come disgust and anger and intolerable mo