THE restorative effect of a day away from the country was visible in Pauline's face and manner when she dawned on the breakfast-table the next morning. The mere tone in which she murmured: "How lovely it is to get back!" showed how lovely it had been to get away—and she lingered over the new-laid eggs, the golden cream, all the country freshnesses and succulences, with the sense of having richly earned them by a long day spent in arduous and agreeable labours.
"When there are tiresome things to be done the great thing is to do them at once," she announced to Nona across the whole-wheat toast and scrambled eggs. "I simply hated to leave all this loveliness yesterday; but how much more I'm going to enjoy it today because I did!"
Her day in town had in truth been exceptionally satisfactory. All had gone well, from her encounter, at Amalasuntha's, with one of the Cardinal's secretaries, to the belated glimpse of Maisie Bruss, haggard but hopeful on the hospital steps, receiving the hamper of fruit and flowers with grateful exclamations, and assurances that the surgeon was "perfectly satisfied," and that there was "no reason why the dreadful thing should ever reappear." In a wave of sympathetic emotion Pauline had leaned from the motor to kiss her and say: "Your mother must have a good rest at Atlantic City as soon as she can be moved—I'll arrange it. Sea air is such a tonic ..." and Maisie had thanked and wept again... It was pleasant to be able, in a few words, to make any one so happy...
She had found Mrs. Swoffer too; found her in a super-terrestrial mood, beaming through inspired eye-glasses, and pouring out new torrents of stimulation.
Yes: Alvah Loft was a great man, Mrs. Swoffer said. She, for her part, had never denied it for a moment. How could Pauline have imagined that her faith in Alvah Loft had failed her? No—but there were periods of spiritual aridity which the brightest souls had to traverse, and she had lately had reason to suspect, from her own experience and from Pauline's, that perhaps Alvah Loft was at present engaged in such a desert. Certainly to charge a hundred dollars for a "triple treatment" (which was only three minutes longer than the plain one), and then produce no more lasting results—well, Mrs. Swoffer preferred not to say anything uncharitable... Then again, she sometimes suspected that Alvah Loft's doctrine might be only for beginners. That was what Sacha Gobine, the new Russian Initiate, plainly intimated. Of course there were innumerable degrees in the spiritual life, and it might be that sometimes Alvah Loft's patients got beyond his level—got above it—without his being aware of the fact. Frankly, that was what Gobine thought (from Mrs. Swoffer's report) must have happened in the case of Pauline. "I believe your friend has reached a higher plane"—that was the way the Initiate put it. "She's been at the gate" (he called the Mahatma and Alvah Loft "gatekeepers"), "and now the gate has opened, and she has entered in—entered into ..." But Mrs. Swoffer said she'd rather not try to quote him because she couldn't put it as beautifully as he did, and she wanted Pauline to hear it in his own mystical language. "It's eternal rejuvenation just to sit and listen to him," she breathed, laying an electric touch on her visitor's hand.
Rejuvenation! The word dashed itself like cool spray against Pauline's strained nerves and parched complexion. She could never hear it without longing to plunge deep into its healing waters. Between manicure and hair-waver she was determined to squeeze in a moment with Gobine.
And the encounter, as she told Nona, had been like "a religious experience"—apparently forgetful of the fact that every other meeting with a new prophet had presented itself to her in identical terms.
"You see, my dear, it's something so entirely new, so completely different ... so emotional; yes, emotional; that's the word. The Russians, of course, are emotional; it's their peculiar quality. Alvah Loft—and you understand that I don't in the least suggest any loss of faith in him; but Alvah Loft has a mind which speaks to the mind; there is no appeal to the feelings. Whereas in Gobine's teaching there is a mystic strain, a kind of Immediacy, as Mrs. Swoffer calls it... Immediacy..." Pauline lingered on the term. It captivated her, as any word did when she first heard it used in a new connection. "I don't know how one could define the sensation better. 'Soul-unveiling' is Gobine's expression... But he insists on time, on plenty of time... He says we are all parching our souls by too much hurry. Of course I always felt that with Alvah Loft. I felt like one of those cash-boxes they shoot along over your head in the department stores. Number one, number two, and so on—always somebody treading on your heels. Whereas Gobine absolutely refuses to be hurried. Sometimes he sees only one patient a day. When I left him he told me he thought he would not see any one else till the next morning. 'I don't want to mingle your soul with any other.' Rather beautiful, wasn't it? And he does give one a wonderful dreamy sense of rest..."
She closed her eyes and leaned back, evoking the gaunt bearded face and heavy-lidded eyes of the new prophet, and the moist adhesive palm he had laid in benediction on her forehead. How different from the thick-lipped oily Mahatma, and from the thin dry Alvah Loft, who seemed more like an implement in a laboratory than a human being! "Perhaps one needs them all in turn," Pauline murmured half-aloud, with the self-indulgence of the woman who has never had to do over an out-of-fashion garment.