“I think it’s religion,” she answered abruptly. “But it’s probably love.”
“Let us take a walk,” he suggested.
They turned in toward the shadows of the great still mountains and the denser, more arrogant shadows of the out-houses and barns. She looked away into the silence, and the night, and a warm sensation as of pleasure or of something expected but intangible came over her, and she wanted to laugh, to cry, and thinking of it she knew that it was neither.
She was almost unconscious of him for a little, thinking of her son. She raised her long silk skirts about her ankles and tramped off into the dampness. A whippoorwill was whistling off to the right. It sounded as if he were on the fence, and Emma stopped and tried to make it out. She took Ulric’s arm presently, and feeling his muscles swell began to think of the Bible. “Those who take by the sword shall die by the sword. And those who live by the flesh shall die by the flesh.”
She wished that she had someone she could believe in. She saw a door before her mental eye, and herself opening it and saying, “Now tell me this, and what it means,—only today I was thinking ‘those who live by the flesh’”—and as suddenly the door was slammed in her face. She started back.
“You are nervous,” he said in a pleased whisper.
Heavy stagnant shadows sprawled in the path. “So many million leaves and twigs to make one dark shadow,” she said, and was sorry because it sounded childishly romantic, quite different from what she had intended, what she had meant.
They turned the corner of the carriage-house. Something moved, a toad, grey and ugly, bounced across her feet and into the darkness of the hedges. Coming to the entrance of the barn they paused. They could distinguish sleeping hens, the white films moving on their eyes—and through a window at the back, steam rising from the dung heap.
“There don’t seem to be any real farmers left,” she said aloud, thinking of some book she had read about the troubles of the peasants and landholders.
“You’re thinking of my country,” he said smiling.