"No."
"Never think in words--all higgledy-piggledy and upside-down, of course--but words that explain to you, even if they couldn't explain to anybody else?"
"No."
"I don't believe any of us have ever done that," Mary continued--"unless perhaps Jane. She thinks in words sometimes, I believe, but I'm sure they hurt her when she does, so she probably does it as little as possible. Just to say they're darlings doesn't convey what you feel. You don't know what you do really feel--do you?"
"No--I suppose I don't."
"I expect that's why, when you have to deal with real things where words only can explain, they come like claps of thunder and are all frightening. I've got something to tell you that will frighten you, Hannah. But it wouldn't have frightened you so much if you'd ever thought about those children in words. I don't believe it would frighten Jane. It would only make her angry."
"What is it?" asked Hannah. She was not frightened as yet. Mary's voice was so quiet, her manner so undisturbed and assured, that as yet no faint suspicion of what she was to hear was troubling her mind.
"Let's come out into the garden," said Mary.
Even there, with that issue, she felt she wanted the light of open air, the growing things about her, the environment her whole body now was tuned to. That room was confined, and suffocating to her. There were the two portraits on the wall, who never, with all their love, would be able to understand what she had to tell. There were the echoes of countless family prayers that had had no meaning. There was all the atmosphere of conventional formality in which she felt neither she nor her child had any place. It was of him she was going to tell. She could not tell it there.
"Come out into the garden," she repeated and herself led the way, when there being something to hear which already Mary had wrapped in this mystery of introduction, Hannah could do no less than follow with obedience.