After a pause Mrs. White said, "How do you like that, dear?"
"Oh, it is beautiful! too beautiful! It makes one so sad afterwards!"
"Do you find that? I don't at all."
"It seems to carry one away into some altogether impossible happiness, and when it is over one feels a regret for it. It is like waking out of a very pleasant dream."
"Poor dear, you won't talk like that when we have got you round. I'm a witch, and I foretell lots of happiness for your young life yet."
"You are always happy, Mrs. White."
"Of course I am. I should be a very discontented person if I was not, with everything to make me happy as I have."
Mary sighed. "And this woman," she thought, "has yet lost her husband, she has lost her love forever, and yet is happy! Could I ever be happy again if I lost mine?" She would have liked to have asked her a question yet dared not. She wondered whether the widow was happy because she knew she would meet her love in another world. "She could not be happy unless she believed this. How sweet must be the lives of such as this woman, so full of love and joy, which even death, they believe, cannot destroy. How different," she thought, "from the agony, the despair, of those like me who know no world but this, who, when their loved ones are taken from them, lose them for ever. Ah, the hopelessness of it!" She felt that she was alone in the world, altogether cut out from the innocent joys and beliefs, for she had tasted the fruits of that poisonous tree of knowledge.
At last she said,
"Music generally raises one curious idea to me, not altogether sad but so strange. That last piece did not raise that idea though, but made me feel wonderfully glad while it lasted."