Page:Cup of Gold-1929.djvu/153

act gathered up and told the whole story of my life in a gesture. Then the loveliness of white petals on black earth absorbed me, and I forgot my symbol. I threw another and another, until the ground was snowed with rose leaves. Suddenly I looked up and saw a dozen men standing about laughing at me. They had come by from church. ‘Hee!’ they said, ‘Robert has lost his mind. Hee! his sense is slipping out of him. Ho! he is a child again, throwing rose petals.’ It seemed a crazed God who could allow this thing.”

Merlin was shaking with a silent glee.

“Oh, Robert! Robert! why must you blame the world when it protects itself against you? I think God and the world are one to you. If there were ten people in the valley below who liked the look of rose leaves on the ground, you would only be a very queer person, interesting and something of a curiosity. They would bring strangers to your house on Sunday afternoons and exhibit you. But, since there are none, of course you are a radical who must be locked up or hanged. Judgment of insanity is truly the hanging of a man's mind. If it be whispered of him that his brain wanders, then nothing he can say will matter to any one ever again, except as a thing to laugh at.

“Can you not see, Robert? People have so often been hurt and trapped and tortured by ideas and contraptions which they did not understand, that they have come to believe all things passing their understanding are vicious and evil—things to be