"We—most of us—are too empty," she put in with quiet resignation. "Our sense of that divine beauty is too faint——"
"Rather," came the quick correction, "he stands too close to us. His effect is too concentrated. The power at such close quarters disturbs and overbalances."
"That's why, then, I always feel it strongest when he's left."
He glanced at her keenly.
"In his presence," she explained, "it's always as though I saw only a part of him, even of his physical appearance, out of the corner of my eye, as it were, and sometimes——" She hesitated. He did not help her this time. "As if those others, many others, similar to himself, but invisible, crowding space about us, were intensely active." Her voice hushed again. "He brings them with him—as now. I feel it, Edward, now. I feel them close." She looked round the empty room, peering through the window into the quiet evening sky. Dr. Fillery also turned away. He sighed again. "Have you noticed, too," he went on presently, yet half as if following his own thoughts, and a trifle incongruously, "the speed and lightness his very movements convey, and how he goes down the street with that curious air of drawing things after him, along with him, as trains and motors draw the loose leaves and dust——"
"Whirling," her quick whisper startled him a little, as she turned abruptly from the window and gazed straight at him. He smiled, instantly recovering himself. "A good word, yes—whirling—but in the plural. As though there were vortices about him."
It was her turn to smile. "That might one day carry him away," she exclaimed. They smiled together then, they even laughed, but somewhere in their laughter, like the lengthening shadows of the spring day outside, lay an incommunicable sadness neither of them could wholly understand.
"Yet the craving for beauty," she said suddenly, "that he leaves behind in me"—her voice wavered—"an intolerable yearning that nothing can satisfy—nothing—here. An infinite desire, it seems, for—for——"
Dr. Fillery took her hand again gently, looking down steadily into the clear eyes that sought his own, and the light glistening in their moisture was similar, he fancied for a moment, to the fire in another pair of shining eyes that never failed to stir the unearthly dreams in him.
"It lies beyond any words of ours," he said softly. "Don't struggle to express it, Iraida. To the flower, the star, we are wise to leave their own expression in their own particular field, for we cannot better it."