"
"It is all the same to me," responded Jean Jacques, "I want to know it
all--to gallop, to trot, to walk, to crawl. Me, I'm a philosopher. I
wait."
"But I thought you were a Catholic," she replied, with a kindly, lurking
smile, which might easily have hardened into scoffing.
"First and last," he answered firmly.
"A Catholic and a philosopher--together in one?" She shrugged a shoulder
to incite him to argument, for he was interesting when excited; when
spurting out little geysers of other people's cheap wisdom and
philosophy, poured through the kind distortion of his own intelligence.
He gave a toss of his head. "Ah, that is my hobby--I reconcile, I unite,
I adapt! It is all the nature of the mind, the far-look, the all-round
sight of the man. I have it all. I see."
He gazed eloquently into the sunset, he swept the horizon with his hand.
"I have the all-round look. I say the Man of Calvary, He is before all,
the sun; but I say Socrates, Plato, Jean Jacques--that is my name, and it
is not for nothing, that--Jean Jacques Rousseau, Descartes, Locke, they
are stars that go round the sun. It is the same light, but not the same
sound. I reconcile. In me all comes together like the spokes to the hub
of a wheel. Me--I am a Christian, I am philosophe, also. In St.
Saviour's, my home in Quebec, if the crops are good, what do men say?
'C'est le bon Dieu--it is the good God,' that is what they say.
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