“And she’s very much in love with him?” asked Silvia.
“You ought to know. She takes you out to Richmond Park and sits on the grass with you all afternoon.”
Silvia wrinkled up her eyes as if she were focusing that afternoon.
“Nellie dazzles me,” she said. “She’s like the sun on water. I expect she’ll make his room, that tidy room, look lovely. But I shall never understand what Nellie does. I shall only understand the effect of what she has done. She has a spell. She makes you see what she has seen.”
She was conscious now of receiving from Peter a more direct answer of eyes than she had ever done before. She knew they were talking about the same things now. They might, each of them, though they were talking of Nellie (superficially the same thing), have been regarding her, have been framing their remarks about her from different angles. Given that, as Silvia had said, she was a dazzle of sunlight as well, one of them, owing to the prismatic process, might have been seeing blue, another seeing yellow. But Peter’s answer convinced her that they were both seeing Nellie from the same standpoint.
“That’s hit her,” he said. “Nellie says and does nothing trivial; one is continually discovering that. She waves her fingers, and she mutters, and then, afterwards, you find she has been making a spell. Isn’t she uncanny? Or she tells you something about yourself that you didn’t know, or scarcely knew, and you find that it is quite solidly true. Is she a witch, do you think?”
Silvia leaned forward towards him. It was impossible not to “close up” with this.
“That’s just what I said to her once,” she said. “I said that she was a witch. She told me something about myself that I never had known. It was true; it had been true all the time. But, literally, I had never had the smallest notion of it till she told me.”
Indeed, as Silvia acknowledged to herself, the truth of what Nellie had said on that occasion was receiving a firm endorsement at this moment. Etched and bitten-in to her consciousness from the moment of that prophetic babbling had been the image of herself in love, singing, so Nellie had said, in a boy’s key; eager to be allowed to give homage rather than receive it; eager to be allowed to love rather than permitting love with whatever ardency of welcome. And here was Peter repeating on general grounds exactly what she had found, and in especial was finding now, to be magically true.
“Since we both agree she is a witch,” said he, “we ought surely to collect evidence against her. What was it she said to you, that something unknown to you, which you found to be true when she said it? I have evidence also; she said something to me last night which I didn’t know, but which——”