Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/20

12 'I know what would have become of me.'

'Well, it's the same thing.'

'Yes,' said Dane's companion, 'it's doubtless the same thing.' On which they sat in silence a little, seeming pleasantly to follow, in the view of the green garden, the vague movements of the monster—madness, surrender, collapse—they had escaped. Their bench was like a box at the opera. 'And I may perfectly, you know,' the Brother pursued, 'have seen you before. I may even have known you well. We don't know.'

They looked at each other again serenely enough, and at last Dane said: 'No, we don't know.'

'That's what I meant by our coming with our eyes closed. Yes—there's something out. There's a gap—a link missing, the great hiatus!' the Brother laughed. 'It's as simple a story as the old, old rupture—the break that lucky Catholics have always been able to make, that they are still, with their innumerable religious houses, able to make, by going into "retreat." I don't speak of the pious exercises; I speak only of the material simplification. I don't speak of the putting off of one's self; I speak only—if one has a self worth sixpence—of the getting it back. The place, the time, the way, were for those of the old persuasion, always there—are indeed practically there for them as much as ever. They can always get off—the blessed houses receive. So it was high time that we—we of the great Protestant peoples, still more, if possible, in the sensitive individual case, overscored and overwhelmed, still more congested with mere quantity and prostituted, through our "enterprise," to mere profanity—should learn how to get off, should find somewhere our retreat and remedy. There was such a huge chance for it!'

Dane laid his hand on his companion's arm. 'It's charming, how, when we speak for ourselves, we speak for each other. That was exactly what I said!' He had fallen to recalling from over the gulf the last occasion.