"Is that all you have to say?" She spoke sharply.
Horatio was removing his galoshes, muddy from a long walk. This operation had to be performed standing, as the only two chairs in the room were occupied, one by the agitated Harriet, the other by the slumbering Martin Luther.
As the curate looked up, clasping one foot in his two hands and hopping absurdly on the other to keep his balance, he resembled some fantastic bird of the crane family. At any other time Harriet might have smiled; now she was too angry. Her white pompadour bristled and her eyes blinked rapidly as if making ready to leap at him.
"It is incomprehensible," he said at length, after depositing the galoshes neatly beneath Martin Luther's chair. "It is incomprehensible, my dear, in this age of aeroplanes and cinematographs and popular education, that anyone should still believe in supernatural phenomena."
Only by shutting her lips tightly and gripping the arms of her chair did Harriet restrain herself from violent interruption. When she spoke it was an explosion.
"Horatio! are you crazy? Don't you understand? There isn't a servant in this house. There's no one to cook our luncheon, and, if there were, there is no one to serve it, no one to do anything, and you stand there and talk about aeroplanes!"
There was a quiet about Horatio that, exasperating as it was, somehow disconcerted Harriet. She watched him silently, resentfully, as he picked up the cushion on which Martin Luther was reposing and deposited it carefully on the floor without waking the cat. Sleepily conscious of the proximity of a sympathetic hand, Martin Luther stretched his paws and extended his neck to be scratched, then curled up to sleep again without having once opened his eyes.
Seating himself in the cushionless chair, Horatio leaned his head against its tall straight back. "No one to serve, no one to do anything." He was echoing Harriet's words; his eyes were resting on hers, yet his thoughts were far away, fixed on something invisible to Harriet, a faded picture in a tarnished gilt frame.
A dim, arched room, a group of uncouth, dark-haired men seated sideways about a long table on which were strangely fashioned tankards and curious goblets. At the feet of one of these men was One who kneeled upon the stone floor. His eyes were sorrowful, His smooth hair fell heavily about his bent shoulders and, above His bowed head, there wavered a thin pale circle of blue-white light. And this One who kneeled upon the stone floor was washing the feet of that other who was seated at the table.
There was a look in her husband's face that carried Harriet's thoughts far away from the present, back to the first time she had seen that look and believed that Horatio was different from any other man, believed that, with her at his side, he was destined to do great things and to help make the world a wonderful place. And what had he done? What had she done? Who was to blame for the failure, for the poverty, for the pitiful dependence? She wondered what was to become of them. How could they stay on here after the way Cousin Hiram had talked? To be sure, Cousin Eleanor had been kindness itself. She had kissed her quite tearfully that morning and hoped she and Horatio would stay with them as long as they kept the house open. She had even hinted at their visiting them in New York.