"You never said it did. You never accepted. You thought there was
something outside, to justify you: God, or a creed, or a prescription.
But remember, your soul inside you is your only Godhead. It develops
your actions within you as a tree develops its own new cells. And the
cells push on into buds and boughs and flowers. And these are your
passion and your acts and your thoughts and expressions, your developing
consciousness. You don't know beforehand, and you can't. You can only
stick to your own soul through thick and thin.

"You are your own Tree of Life, roots and limbs and trunk. Somewhere
within the wholeness of the tree lies the very self, the quick: its own
innate Holy Ghost. And this Holy Ghost puts forth new buds, and pushes
past old limits, and shakes off a whole body of dying leaves. And the
old limits hate being empassed, and the old leaves hate to fall. But
they must, if the tree-soul says so...."

They had sat again during this harangue, under a white wall. Aaron
listened more to the voice than the words. It was more the sound value
which entered his soul, the tone, the strange speech-music which sank
into him. The sense he hardly heeded. And yet he understood, he knew.
He understood, oh so much more deeply than if he had listened with his
head. And he answered an objection from the bottom of his soul.

"But you talk," he said, "as if we were like trees, alone by ourselves
in the world. We aren't. If we love, it needs another person than
ourselves. And if we hate, and even if we talk."

"Quite," said Lilly. "And that's just the point. We've got to love and
hate moreover--and even talk. But we haven't got to fix on any one of
these modes, and say that's the only mode. It is such imbecility to say
that love and love alone must rule. It is so obviously not the case. Yet
we try and make it so."

"I feel that," said Aaron. "It's all a lie."

"It's worse. It's a half lie. But listen. I told you there were two
urges--two great life-urges, didn't I? There may be more. But it comes
on me so strongly, now, that there are two: love, and power. And
we've been trying to work ourselves, at least as individuals, from the
love-urge exclusively, hating the power-urge, and repressing it. And now
I find we've got to accept the very thing we've hated.

"We've exhausted our love-urge, for the moment. And yet we try to force
it to continue working. So we get inevitably anarchy and murder. It's
no good. We've got to ac