Page:Gide - Strait is the Gate.pdf/171

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169 STRAIT IS THE GATE

" He didn't give it me, but it was while reading him that I got it . . . . It was Pasca. Perhaps I lighted on some passage that was not so good. ..." I made an impatient movement. She spoke in a clear, monotonous voice, as if she were reciting a lesson, not lifting her eyes from her flowers, which she went on arranging and re-arranging interminably. She stopped for an instant at my movement and then continued in the same tone: "Such surprising grandiloquence and such effort! —and to prove so little! I wonder some times whether his pathetic intonation is not the result of doubt rather than of faith. The voice of perfect faith speaks with fewer tears, with fewer tremors. " “It is just those very tremors, those very tears, which make the beauty of his voice, "I endeavoured to retort, although dispiritedly; for in her words I could recognise nothing of what I loved in Alissa. I write them down as I remember them, and without any after addition of either art or logic. “If he had not first emptied this life of its joy,” she went on,“ it would weigh heavier in the balance than..."

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