with a laugh: "what is the use of anything? The same old thoughts
passing through the same human minds from year to year and century to
century, just as the same clouds float across the same blue sky. The
clouds are born in the sky, and the thoughts are born in the brain, and
they both end in tears and re-arise in blind, bewildering mist, and this
is the beginning and end of thoughts and clouds. They arise out of the
blue; they overshadow and break into storms and tears, then they are
drawn up into the blue again, and the story begins afresh."

"So you don't think that one can be happy in this world?" he asked.

"I did not say that--I never said that. I do think that happiness is
possible. It is possible if one can love somebody so hard that one can
quite forget oneself and everything else except that person, and it
is possible if one can sacrifice oneself for others. There is no true
happiness outside of love and self-sacrifice, or rather outside of love,
for it includes the other. This is gold, and all the rest is gilt."

"How do you know that?" he asked quickly. "You have never been in love."

"No," she answered, "I have never been in love like that, but all the
happiness I have had in my life has come to me from loving. I believe
that love is the secret of the world: it is like the philosopher's stone
they used to look for, and almost as hard to find, but if you find it
it turns everything to gold. Perhaps," she went on with a little laugh,
"when the angels departed from the earth they left us love behind, that
by it and through it we may climb up to them again. It is the one thing
that lifts us above the brutes. Without love man is a brute, and nothing
but a brute; with love he draws near to God. When everything else falls
away the love will endure because it cannot die while there is any life,
if it is true love, for it is immortal. Only it must be true--you see it
must be true."

He had penetrated her reserve now; the ice of her manner broke up
beneath the warmth of her words, and her face, usually impassive, had
caught life and light from the eyes above, and acquired a certain beauty
of its own. John looked at it, and understood something of the untaught
and ill-regulated intensity and depth of the nature of this curious
girl. He met her eyes and they moved him strangely, though he was not
an emotional man, and was too old to experience spasmodic thrills at the
chance glances of a pretty woman. He moved towar