“Good gracious!” cried Barbara again, but with yet greater energy—then seeing what he meant, laughed at her mistake.
“But then,” she said, with eager resumption, “you must believe there is something to strip her body off? I do! I have always thought so!”
“So have I, and so I do indeed!” answered Wingfold. “I can't prove it. I can't prove anything—to my own satisfaction, that is, though I dare say I might to the satisfaction of one who did not love the creatures enough to be anxious about them. I don't think you can prove anything that is worth being anxious about.”
“Then why do you believe it?” asked Barbara, influenced by the talk of the century.
“Because I can,” answered Wingfold. “To believe and to be able to prove, have little or nothing to do with each other. To believe and to convince have much to do with each other.”
“But,” persisted Barbara, with Richard in her mind, “how are you to be sure of a thing you can't prove?”
“That's a good question, and this is my answer,” said Wingfold:—“What you love, you already believe enough to put it to the proof of trial. My life is such a proving; and the proof is so promising that it fills me with the happiest hope. To prove with your brains the thing you love, would be to deck the garments of salvation with a useless fringe. Shall I search heaven and earth for proof that my wife is a good and lovely woman? The signs of it are everywhere; the proofs of it nowhere.”
They walked along for a while, side by side, in silence. Which had turned and gone with the other neither knew. Barbara was beginning already to feel that safety which almost everybody sooner or later came to feel in Wingfold's company—a safety born of the sense that, in the closest talk, he never lay in wait for a victory, but took his companion, as one of his own people, into the end after which he was striving.
“Then,” said Barbara at length, still thinking of Richard, “if you believe that even the beasts are saved, you must think it very bad of a man not to believe in a God!”
“I should think anyhow that he didn't care much about the beasts—that he hadn't a heart big enough to take the beasts in!”