There is a time for
everything. You talk like one of those good little children in
books that always die--at least I have heard of such books--I never
saw any of them."
Cosmo laughed again.
"Which of us is the merrier--you or me? Which of us is the
stronger, Joan? The moment I saw you, I thought you looked like one
that hadn't enough of something--as if you weren't happy; but if
you knew that the great beautiful person we call God, was always
near you, it would be impossible for you to go on being sad."
Joan gave a great sigh: her heart knew its own bitterness, and
there was little joy in it for a stranger to intermeddle with. But
she said to herself the boy would be a gray-haired man before he
was twenty, and began to imagine a mission to help him out of these
morbid fancies.
"You must surely understand, Cosmo," she said, "that, while we are
in this world, we must live as people of this world, not of
another."
"But you can't mean that the people of this world are banished from
Him who put them in it! He is all the same, in this world and in
every other. If anything makes us happy, it must make us much
happier to know it for a bit of frozen love--for the love that
gives is to the gift as water is to snow. Ah, you should hear our
torrent sing in summer, and shout in the spring! The thought of God
fills me so full of life that I want to go and do something for
everybody. I am never miserable.
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