There is a very lovely woman in the midst, clothed all in white, and as the scream dies away these are the words she’s saying: “Alas! too true! and was it not disgusting?” And the other women yawn, and echo, with airy laughs, “Oh! terribly disgusting.”
And Deborah, looking round on the chill moor, sees it peopled with white Spirits all looking in the same direction, to that vision of fair women.
And then the curtain falls upon them, and Deborah, looking at the forms around her, sees a smile on every lip of scarcely veiled cynicism. “Oh! terribly disgusting,” they cry with the right accent and tone, and look at one another and laugh as Spirits will, and then disappear once more.
The Spirit turned to Deborah.
“The voice of that woman is as clear as a bell,” he remarked, with a cruel smile. “Think you it would echo well through the Silent Forest?”
“I cannot say,” answered Deborah.
He laughed.
“Some day we shall hear it,” he went on. “Now or then, willy-nilly, each man treads it, and alone—now or then.”
“But she seemed a wealthy woman of the world.”
“And she will die a success to the world,” he rejoined, kicking a pebble thoughtfully with his sandalled foot, so that flint sparks shot from it. “But we have all to reckon with eternity. It can canker and rust, and make harsh discord of one-time harmony. A rusty bell with a broken clapper is not very delightful to the ear at the best of times. Now let us sit down on this rock and talk. See, I will draw my mantle round you, and then we shall scarce feel the cold.”