“I should hope not. With your talents and education I could not have believed it of you. And yet—you hardly know where to draw the line. When you find people, whose upbringing and education, and everything else, ought to put them miles above anything of the kind, steeped over head and ears in such puerile superstitions as throwing spilled salt over the shoulder, scared of having a peacock’s feather brought into their houses, or of getting up first of thirteen from the table, or of walking under a ladder—really it makes one—well, cynical.”
“But—walking under a ladder is unlucky sometimes, Mr Wagram.”
“Very likely to be, if you don’t first ascertain whether there’s a journeyman painter up it with a paint pot—not otherwise.”
Then they both laughed—for Wagram the first laugh he had indulged in since the bolt had fallen. Well, he could still laugh; yet but now it had seemed to him that he never would laugh again.
“But—you’ll admit there are people who can tell you strange—and even startling—things about yourself that they can’t possibly have got at by any ordinary means.”
“I’ll admit nothing of the kind. I know the old stock business—I have had it thrown at me too often. Some fool—usually some feminine fool—goes to one of these impostors—not the hedge-side type of fraud but the fashionable ditto—and pays down her guineas to be told such and such. She is told such and such, and it amazes her. Then, in retailing it, she invariably ends up with: ‘But, how do you account for it?’ I always answer I can’t account for it, any more than I can account for how the clever card conjurer takes ace and king and queen out of the top of the head of the baldest man in the audience; but he does it, and nobody dreams of associating the supernatural with the process. It’s the same thing here. It’s part of the system to find out things; and they do it. If you were let into the secret you’d probably laugh at the simplicity with which it’s done. No; really, I’ve no patience with that sort of absurdity; it’s too childish.”
“Looked at in that light it is. You do put things straight, Mr Wagram.”
“Well, but—isn’t it so? I have even heard people attribute that sort of quackery to satanic influence, which has almost struck me, if one may say so, as insulting to the intelligence of the devil. But it is getting rather dusk. You will want your lamp before you get home. Is it in good lighting order?”
If a momentary temptation beset Delia to pretend it was not, so as to afford a pretext for accompanying him to the house, which was not very far distant, she heroically stifled it; so between them they lighted the lamp.
“Good-bye, Mr Wagram. Thanks so much. I promise you I won’t dabble in the black art again,” she said as they shook hands; and mounting she skimmed away down the now shadowy road, going over in her mind every word, every tone of the, in hard fact, utterly unmomentous interview. And he, striking into a woodland path on the other side, continued his walk in the deepening gloom, to the accompaniment of the ghostly hooting of owls. It was strange that he should have fallen in with this girl just then, and in his then frame of mind it seemed to him that her glance and tone and demeanour were very sweet, very soothing, very sympathetic. And then—he ceased to give her another thought.