"God knows. The only thing is to stop it, as one does hysteria. It's on a par with hysteria."
"Quite," she said.
Lord Lathkill was dancing, and smiling very curiously down into his partner's face. The Victrola was at its loudest.
Carlotta and I looked at one another, with hardly the heart to start again. The house felt hollow and gruesome. One wanted to get out, to get away from the cold, uncanny blight which filled the air.
"Oh, I say, keep the ball rolling," called Lord Lathkill.
"Come," I said to Carlotta.
Even then she hung back a little. If she had not suffered, and lost so much, she would have gone upstairs at once to struggle in the silent wrestling of wills with her mother-in-law. Even now, that particular fight drew her, almost the strongest. But I took her hand.
"Come," I said. "Let us dance it down. We'll roll the ball the opposite way."
She danced with me, but she was absent, unwilling. The empty gloom of the house, the sense of cold, and of deadening opposition, pressed us down. I was looking back over my life, and thinking how the cold weight of an unliving spirit was slowly crushing all warmth and vitality out of everything. Even Carlotta herself had gone numb again, cold and resistant even to me. The thing seemed to happen wholesale in her.
"One has to choose to live," I said, dancing on.