CHAPTER I
There is a state wherein the mind, normally the court of pleas where reason receives and administers the supplications of the senses, is not in session. Reason is sick, suspends his office, abrogates his authority, withdraws to some deep fastness of the brain, and suffers the hall of judgment to be the house of license or of dreams: of dreams, as sleep, as vanity of reverie; of license when there is tumult in the body politic, as fever, as excesses of the passions, as great shock. Reason is sick, withdraws, and there is strange business in that place.
If that is just the way one writes, not susceptible of easy comprehension, and not enough explanatory of Rosalie’s condition, it goes like this in Rosalie’s own words. Drooped back there in her chair before that littered disarray of lunch, and that key lying there, and Harry stooping over her and holding both her hands, she said, “Oh, Harry! Oh, Harry! I feel deathly sick.”
She said it had been a most frightful shock to her, what Huggo had declared. She said, “Oh, Harry, I feel all undone.”
Undone! We’ll try to feel her mind with that; to let that explain her when she said this else, and when she wrote some things that shall be given.
She said she had suffered, in that moment of crying out to Huggo and of stretching out her arm to him, the most extraordinary—what was the word?—the most extraordinary hallucination. “Harry, when Huggo said that frightful thing! Oh, Harry, like an extraordinary dream, I was a child again. It wasn’t here; it was happening; it was the rectory; and not you and the children but all us children that used to be around the table there. No, not quite that. More extraordinary than that. Robert was there; Robert, I think, in Huggo’s place; and all the rest were me—me as I used to be when I was ten; small, grave, wondering, staring. And yet myself me too as I was then—oh, horrified as I’d have then been horrified to hear the Bible stories called untrue; jumped up and crying out, ‘It isn’t! It isn’t!’ as I would then have jumped up and cried out; and all the other Rosalies staring in wonder as I’d have stared. Oh, extraordinary, extraordinary! Within this minute, I have been a child again. The strangest thing, the strangest thing!
“I was a child again, Harry, in a blue frock I used to wear and in a pinafore that had a hole in it; and all those other Rosalies the same. Those other Rosalies! To see them! Harry, I’ve not seen that Rosalie I used to be—not years and years. That tiny innocent! It is upon me still. I feel that small child still. Oh, I feel it! I remember—dear, did I ever tell you?—when my father once... had been talking about Cambridge... and suddenly cried out, it was at breakfast, ‘Cambridge! My youth! My God, my God, my youth!’ There was coffee from a cup that he’d knocked over came oozing, and I just sat there huge-eyed, staring, a small, grave wondering child....
“Oh, Harry, my youth, my childhood—and now the children’s! The difference! The difference!”
Harry talked to her. He ended, “The teaching, all the ideas, dear girl, you mustn’t worry, it’s all different nowadays.”