Greeks, Egyptians, Gauls, and Britons, to forgive enemies, to return
them good for evil, and to love them, seemed madness. At the same time
he had a feeling that in that madness itself there was something
mightier than all philosophies so far. He thought that because of its
madness it was impracticable, but because of its impracticability it was
divine. In his soul he rejected it; but he felt that he was parting as
if from a field full of spikenard, a kind of intoxicating incense; when
a man has once breathed of this he must, as in the land of the lotus-
eaters, forget all things else ever after, and yearn for it only.

It seemed to him that there was nothing real in that religion, but that
reality in presence of it was so paltry that it deserved not the time
for thought. Expanses of some kind, of which hitherto he had not had a
suspicion, surrounded him,--certain immensities, certain clouds. That
cemetery began to produce on him the impression of a meeting-place for
madmen, but also of a place mysterious and awful, in which, as on a
mystic bed, something was in progress of birth the like of which had not
been in the world so far. He brought before his mind all that, which
from the first moment of his speech, the old man had said touching life,
truth, love, God; and his thoughts were dazed from the brightness, as
the eyes are blinded from lightning flashes which follow each other
unceasingly.

As is usual with people for whom life has been turned into one single
passion, Vinicius thought of all this through the medium of his love for
Lygia; and in the light of those flashes he saw one thing distinctly,
that if Lygia was in the cemetery, if she confessed that religion,
obeyed and felt it, she never could and never would be his mistress.

For the first time, then, since he had made her acquaintance at Aulus's,