“A compromise with Satan, little Wolf! Have you forgotten all you told me when you left him? All that about his book being simply naughty scandal? Will you never face the facts of life, my son? Can’t you accept once for all that we all have to be bad sometimes⁠ ⁠… just as we all have to be good sometimes? Where you make your great mistake, Wolf”⁠—here her voice became gentler and her eyes strangely illuminated⁠—“is in not recognizing the loneliness of everyone. We have to do outrageous things sometimes, just because we are lonely! It was in a mood like yours when you came in just now that God created the world. What could have been more outrageous than to set such a thing as this in motion? But we’re in it now; and we’ve got to move as it moves.”

She lifted the cold dregs of her coffee-cup to her lips and drained them with a sigh.