the gaiety of the saints?  Not the pleasant cheerfulness of the Denis Urquharts and their kind, who have things, but the gaiety, in the teeth of circumstances, of St. Francis and his paupers, who have nothing and yet possess all things.  That’s your gaiety; the gaiety that plays the fool, as you put it, looking into the very eyes of agony and death; that loses and laughs and makes others laugh in the last ditch; the gaiety of those who drop all cargoes, fortune and good name and love, overboard lightly, and still spread sail to the winds and voyage, and when they’re driven by the winds at last onto a lee shore, derelicts clinging to a broken wreck, find on the shore coloured shells to play with and still are gay.  That’s your gaiety, as I’ve always known it and loved it.  Are you going to chuck that gaiety away, and rise up full of the lust to possess, and take and grasp and plunder?  Are you going to desert the empty-handed legion, whose van you’ve marched in all your life, and join the prosperous?” Rodney broke off for a moment, as if he waited for an answer.  He rose from his chair and began to walk about the room, speaking again, with a more alright vehemence.  “Oh, you may think this is mere romance, fancy, sentiment, what you will.  But it isn’t.  It’s deadly, solid truth.  You can’t grasp.  You can’t try to change your camp.  You—­and Lucy too, for she’s in the same camp—­wouldn’t be happy, to put it at its simplest.  You’d know all the time that you’d shirked, deserted, been false to your business.  You’d be fishes out of water, with the knowledge that you’d taken for your own pleasure something that someone else ought to have had.  It isn’t in either of you to do it.  You must leave such work to the Haves.  Why, what happens the first time you try it on?  You have to send back the goods you’ve tried to appropriate to where they came from.  It would be the same always.  You don’t know how to possess.  Then in heaven’s name leave possessing alone, and stick to the job you are good at—­doing without.  For you are good at that.  You always have been, except just for just one short interlude, which will pass like an illness and leave you well again.  Believe me, it will.  I don’t know when, or how soon; but I do know that sometime you will be happy again, with the things, the coloured shells, so to speak, that you find still when all the winds and storms have done their worst and all your cargoes are broken wrecks at your feet.  It will be then, in that last emptiness, that you’ll come to terms with disaster, and play the fool again to amuse yourself and the other derelicts, because, when there’s nothing else left, there’s always laughter.”

Rodney had walked to the window, and now stood looking out at the dim, luminous night, wherein, shrouded, the Easter moon dwelt in the heart of shadows.  From many churches, many clocks chimed the hour.  Rodney spoke once more, slowly, leaning out into the shadowy night.