"'I am a brute and a fool,' he said vehemently. 'But it is always so
with me. I always feel as if what I want others must want. I always feel
universal. It's folly. You have your vocation, I mine. Yours is to pray,
mine is to live.'
"Again I was conscious of the bitterness. I tried to put it from me.
"'Prayer is life,' I answered, 'to me, to us who are here.'
"'Prayer! Can it be? Can it be vivid as the life of experience, as
the life that teaches one the truth of men and women, the truth of
creation--joy, sorrow, aspiration, lust, ambition of the intellect and
the limbs? Prayer--'
"'It is time for me to go,' I said. 'Are you coming to the chapel?'
"'Yes,' he answered almost eagerly. 'I shall look down on you from my
lonely gallery. Perhaps I shall be able to feel the life of prayer.'
"'May it be so,' I said.
"But I think I spoke without confidence, and I know that that evening I
prayed without impulse, coldly, mechanically. The long, dim chapel, with
its lines of monks facing each other in their stalls, seemed to me a
sad place, like a valley of dry bones--for the first time, for the first
time.
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