ed from great happiness. These intense joys of
which you speak--what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any
violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably,
followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a
beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this
highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the
great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the
track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or
woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost
certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."

"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"

"Of what other parent can it be the child? In my opinion those who are
said to be 'born in misery' never know what real misery is. It is only
those who have drunk deep of the cup of joy who can drink deep of the cup
of sorrow."

Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly burst in with the
vehement exclamation:

"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track? Where's the courage
in avoiding the garden for fear of the swamp?"

"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Hermione, her whole face
lighting up. "I never expected to hear a counsel of cowardice from you,
Emile."

"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"

He looked at them both steadily, feeling still as if he were face to face
with children. For a man he was unusually intuitive, and to-night
suddenly, and after he had begun to yield to his desire to be cruel, to
say something that would cloud this dual happiness in which he had no
share, he felt a strange, an almost prophetic conviction that out of the
joy he now contemplated would be born the gaunt offspring, misery, of
which he had just spoken. With the coming of this conviction, which he
did not even try to explain to himself or to combat, came an abrupt
change in his feelings. Bitterness gave place to an anxiety that was far
more human, to a desire to afford some protection to these two people
with whom he was sitting. But how? And against what? He did not know. His
intuition stopped short when he strove to urge it on.

"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent to avoid the joy life
throws at your feet?"

Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry, too, with his erratic
mental departure from the realm of reason into the realm of fantasy--for
so he