Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “but this is frightful!” “Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.” His eye stabbed at hers. “Would you?” “Well… No.” … - Poul Anderson

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Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “but this is frightful!”
“Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.”
His eye stabbed at hers. “Would you?”
“Well… No.”
“Locked among bleak brick walls for all her days; shorn, harshly clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither that which God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time.…”
“Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.”
“Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You, too—in your heart—not so?—whether or not you have said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”