impossible to you. With science you
were going to penetrate the secret of the world, and make the perfect
happiness of humanity a reality. According to you, we were progressing
with giant strides. Each day brought its discovery, its certainty. Ten,
fifty, a hundred years more, perhaps, and the heavens would open and we
should see truth face to face. Well, the years pass, and nothing opens,
and truth recedes."

"You are an impatient girl," he answered simply. "If ten centuries more
be necessary we must only wait for them to pass."

"It is true. I cannot wait. I need to know; I need to be happy at once,
and to know everything at once, and to be perfectly and forever happy.
Oh, that is what makes me suffer, not to be able to reach at a bound
complete knowledge, not to be able to rest in perfect felicity, freed
from scruples and doubts. Is it living to advance with tortoiselike pace
in the darkness, not to be able to enjoy an hour's tranquillity, without
trembling at the thought of the coming anguish? No, no! All knowledge
and all happiness in a single day? Science has promised them to us, and
if she does not give them to us, then she fails in her engagements."

Then he, too, began to grow heated.

"But what you are saying is folly, little girl. Science is not
revelation. It marches at its human pace, its very effort is its glory.
And then it is not true that science has promised happiness."

She interrupted him hastily.

"How, not true! Open your books up there, then. You know that I have
read them. Do they not overflow with promises? To read them one would
think we were marching on to the conquest of earth and heaven. They
demolish everything, and they swear to replace everything--and that
by pure reason, with stability and wisdom. Doubtless I am like the
children. When I am promised anything I wish that it shall be given
me at once. My imagination sets to work, and the object must be very
beautiful to satisfy me. But it would have been easy not to have
promised anything. And above all, at this hour, in view of my eager and
painful longing, it would be very ill done to tell me that nothing has
been promised me."

He made a gesture, a simple gesture of protestation and impatience, in
the serene and silent night.

"In any case," she continued, "science has swept away all our past
beliefs. The earth is bare, the heavens are empty, and what do you wish
that I should become, even if you acquit science of having inspi