“No,” she laughed, with a touch of playful disappointment. “We get that from a farm five miles down the valley. It’s in special honour of your arrival, this.”
“Our nearest contact with the outside world,” added Julius, “and over a thousand feet below us. We’re on a little plateau here all by ourselves——”
“Put away like,” she interrupted gaily, “as though we’d been naughty,” and then she added, “or for something special and very mysterious.” She looked into his face half archly, half inquisitively, as if aware of something she divined yet could not understand. Her honesty and sincerity made every little thing she said seem dignified. I was again aware of pathos.
“The peace and quiet,” I put in quickly, conscious of something within me that watched and listened intently, “must be delightful—after the cities—and with the great storms you mention to break the possible monotony.”
She looked at me a full moment steadily, and in her eyes, no longer green but sky-blue, I read the approach of that strange expression I called another “face,” that in the end, however, did not fully come. But the characteristic struck me, for Julius had it too.
“Oh, you find out all about yourself in a place like this,” she said slowly, “a whole lot of things you didn’t know before. You’ll like it; but it’s not for everybody. It’s very élite.” She turned to Julius. “The Professor’ll love it, won’t he? And we must keep him,” she repeated, “now we’ve got him.”
Something moved between the three of us as she said it. There was no inclination in me to smile, even at the absurd choice of a word. An upheaving sense of challenge came across the air at me, including not only ourselves at the breakfast table, but the entire valley as well. Against some subterranean door in me rose sudden pressure, and the woman’s commonplace words had in them something incalculable that caused the door to yield. Out rushed a pouring, bursting flood. A wild delight of beauty ran suddenly in my civilised veins; I felt uplifted, stimulated, carried off my feet.
It was but the flash and touch of a passing mood, of course, yet it marked a change in me, another change. She was aware of elemental powers even as her husband was. First through him, but now through her, I, too, was becoming similarly—aware.
I glanced at Julius, calmly devouring bread and milk beyond all reach of comedy—Julius who recognised an “old soul” in a servant girl with the same conviction that he invoked the deific Powers of a conscious Nature; to whom nothing was trivial, nothing final, the future magnificent as the past, and behind whose chair stood the Immensities whispering messages of his tireless evolutionary scheme. And I saw him “unclassable”—merely an eternal, travelling soul, working out with myself and with this other “soul” some detail long neglected by the three of us. Marriage, class, social status, education, culture—what were they but temporary external details, whose sole value lay in their providing conditions for acquiring certain definite experiences? Life’s outer incidents were but episodic, after all.
And this flash of insight into his point of view came upon me thus suddenly through her. The mutual sympathy and understanding between the three of us that he so keenly watched for had advanced rapidly. Another stage was reached. The foundations seemed already established here among us.