Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/279



we had started toward Santo Espiritu, a delicate rosy afterglow succeeded the abrupt gray interval, but our backs were now turned upon it, and we only glanced at it now and then over our shoulders.

"The silence said to me," Cornelia resumed, "that I had been a very foolish woman, because I had expected of a human companionship an intimacy of sympathy and understanding which only a Divine companionship can give."

"How do you know, Cornelia? How do you know?"

"I don't know how it is with you—with men. Maybe a man can fill his life so full of the things he is doing—with work and ambition and the improvement of the world—that he doesn't have to have an 'inner life.' For me, for most women, there has to be an inner life. We live so much in our personal relations; and I, at any rate, can't live my life unless I feel every day, all the time, my relation to something that is peaceful and beautiful and good, and that doesn't change."