He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him. “Does your whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula? What will you do in this wicked world? What will you say to the sinner when you meet him—as you must?”
“I don’t know; it’s a problem I have never been brought to consider. I feel as if launched on a dismal sea for which I have neither chart nor compass. Life was so joyous to me this morning—” a flush swept over her cheek but he did not notice it—“I held, or seemed to hold, a cup of white wine in my hand, but suddenly as I looked at it, it turned black and—”
Ah, the outreach, the dismal breaking away of thought into the unfathomable, that lies in the pause of an and!
“And do you refuse to drink a cup across which has fallen a shadow,” murmured Mr. Sylvester, his eyes fixed on her face, “the inevitable shadow of that great mass of human frailty and woe which has been accumulating from the foundation of the world?”
“No, no, I cannot, and retain my humanity. If there is such evil in the world, its pressure must drive it across the path of innocence.”
“And you accept the cup?”
“I must; but oh, my vanished beliefs! This morning the wine of my life was pure and white, now it is black and befouled. What will make it clean again?”
With a sigh Mr. Sylvester dropped her hand and turned towards the mantle-piece. It was April as I have said, and there was no fire in the grate, but he posed his foot on the fender and looked sadly down at the empty hearthstone.
“Paula,” said he after a space of pregnant silence, “it had to come. The veil of the temple must be rent in every life. Evil is too near us all for us to tread long upon the flowers without starting up the adders that hide beneath them. You had to have your first look into the cells of darkness, and perhaps it is best you had it here and now. The deeps are for men’s eyes as well as the starry heavens.”
“Yes, yes.”