‘One set of influences gets at me, another gets at you. It’s according to our temperaments, I think.’ She glanced significantly at the vile portfolio. ‘Sometimes they are mixed—and therefore false. There has always been in me, more than in you, the pagan thing, perhaps, though never, thank God, like that.’
The frank confession of course invited my own, as it was meant to do. Yet it was difficult to find the words.
‘What I have felt in this place, Frances, I honestly can hardly tell you, because—er—my impressions have not arranged themselves in any definite form I can describe. The strife, the agony of vainly-sought escape, and the unrest—a sort of prison atmosphere—this I have felt at different times and with varying degrees of strength. But I find, as yet, no final label to attach. I couldn’t say pagan, Christian, or anything like that, I mean, as you do. As with the blind and deaf, you may have an intensification of certain senses denied to me, or even another sense altogether in embryo——’
‘Perhaps,’ she stopped me, anxious to keep to the point, ‘you feel it as Mabel does. She feels the whole thing complete.’
‘That also is possible,’ I said very slowly. I was thinking behind my words. Her odd remark that it was ‘big and awful’ came back upon me as true. A vast sensation of distress and discomfort swept me suddenly. Pity was in it, and a fierce contempt, a savage, bitter anger as well. Fury against some sham authority was part of it.
‘Frances,’ I said, caught unawares, and dropping all pretence, ‘what in the world can it be?’ I looked hard at her. For some minutes neither of us spoke.
‘Have you felt no desire to interpret it?’ she asked presently.
‘Mabel did suggest my writing something about the house,’ was my reply, ‘but I’ve felt nothing imperative. That sort of writing is not my line, you know. My only feeling,’ I added, noticing that she waited for more, ‘is the impulse to explain, discover, get it out of me somehow, and so get rid of it. Not by writing, though—as yet.’ And again I repeated my former question: ‘What in the world do you think it is?’ My voice had become involuntarily hushed. There was awe in it.
Her answer, given with slow emphasis, brought back all my reserve: the phraseology provoked me rather:—
‘Whatever it is, Bill, it is not of God.’