Do you mean what you say?
Do you truly feel that you are a shadow--that this garden is but a world
of shadows? I feel that I, that you, are terrific realities, that this
garden is of immense significance. Look at that sky.'
"The sky above the cypresses was red with sunset. The trees looked black
beneath it. Fireflies were flitting near the arbour where we sat.
"'That is the sky that roofs what you would have me believe a world of
shadows. It is like the blood, the hot blood that flows and surges in
the veins of men--in our veins. Ah, but you are a monk!'
"The way he said the last words made me feel suddenly a sense of shame,
Domini. It was as if a man said to another man, 'You are not a man.' Can
you--can you understand the feeling I had just then? Something hot and
bitter was in me. A sort of desperate sense of nothingness came over me,
as if I were a skeleton sitting there with flesh and blood and trying to
believe, and to make it believe, that I, too, was and had been flesh and
blood.
"'Yes, thank God, I am a monk,' I answered quietly.
"Something in my tone, I think, made him feel that he had been brutal.
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