You are often very near degenerating
into a common sophist."
"Very likely, it was a charming profession. Meanwhile, by going to the
very opposite extreme from sophistry, I mean by a more than Quixotic
veneration for an abstract dogma you hold to be true, and by your
determination to make people die for it, you are causing fearful misery
of body, untold agony of soul, to a woman and a man whom you should have
every reason to like. Go to, Ram Lal, adept, magician, enthusiast, and
prophet, you are mistaken, like all your kind!"
"No, I am not mistaken, time will show. Moreover, I would have you
remark that the lady in question is not suffering at all, and that the
'untold agony of soul' you attribute to Isaacs is a wholesome medicine
for one with such a soul as his. And now I am going, for you are not the
sort of person with whom I can enjoy talking very long. You are violent
and argumentative, though you are sometimes amusing. I am rarely
violent, and I never argue: life is too short. And yet I have more time
for it than you, seeing my life will be indefinitely longer than yours.
Good-bye, for the present; and believe me, those two will be happier
far, and far more blessed, in a few short years hence, than ever you or
I shall be in all the unreckonable cycles of this or any future world.
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