V


I said suddenly, "The joy of this place is not the security of it, but
the fact that one has not to think about security. I am not afraid of
anything that may happen, and there is no weariness of thought. One does
not think till one is tired, but till one has finished thinking."

"Yes," said Amroth, "that was the misery of the poor body!"

"And yet I used to think," I said, "in the old days that I was grateful
to the body for many pleasant things it gave me--breathing the air,
feeling the sun, eating and drinking, games and exercise, and the
strange thing one called love."

"Yes," said Amroth, "all those things have to be made pleasant, or to
appear so; otherwise no one could submit to the discipline at all; but
of course the pleasure only got in the way of the thought and of the
happiness; it was not what one saw, tasted, smelt, felt, that one
desired, but the real thing behind it; even the purest thing of all, the
sight and contact of one whom one loved, let us say, with no sensual
passion at all, but with a perfectly pure love; what a torment that
was--desiring something which one could not get, the real fusion of
feeling and thought! But the poor body was always in the way then,
saying, 'Here am I--please me, amuse me.'"

"But then," I said, "what is the use of all that? Why should the pure,
clear, joyful, sleepless life I now feel be tainted and hampered and