I am lying in the hollow between two rows of graves, breathing the perfume of the white forest gilliflowers, abloom in the "Kirkut," and thinking of life—of this most admirable and most beautiful marvel, life. I am explaining to Martha how my worship of life is really the outcome of resignation.
"But in me resignation has taken a form that it has not in you. 'If I cannot have all, I refuse to have anything;' such is the creed of despairing pride, held by slaves and wretched men. My belief in Azoism is nothing but the creed of a proud woman, who is reconciled to her slavery, and will take up no spurious imitations of freedom. Such a withdrawal from the vortex we live in, enabling me to look on all things as Garborg does, from above them, and with a smile of dignified amenity—this is what I love. It often seems to me, so little I feel adapted for my life on earth, that I have somehow wandered hither by a mischance, a blunder."
"It is well," says Martha. "Adaptation to environment is of avail only to brute animals: man can make his own world by viewing it in his own special way.
"I," she goes on to say sadly, "believe in
