The change that had passed over them was like the change
that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among
dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he
finds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world.
Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with no
fatigue to dog it, and from a consciousness of the vital issues which
we were pursuing. But my companions had still intellectual faults and
preferences, self-confidence, critical intolerance, boisterousness,
wilfulness. Stranger still, I found coldness, anger, jealousy, still at
work. Of course in the latter case reconciliation was easier, both in
the light of common enthusiasm and, still more, because mental
communication was so much swifter and easier than it had been on earth.
There was no need of those protracted talks, those tiresome explanations
which clever people, who really love and esteem each other, fall into on
earth--the statements which affirm nothing, the explanations which
elucidate nothing, because of the intricacies of human speech and the
fact that people use the same words with such different implications and
meanings.
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