“I don’t think they’re extraordinary. If matter were permanent in the sense you mean, then life would be permanent in the same sense, because we’re matter, and we shouldn’t die.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
Young Wingfield looked at Katharine with an air of entreaty, as though hoping that she, at least, might understand what Mr. Griggs meant. She smiled as she saw his expression, and understood what was passing in his mind. She was supposed to have seen far more of Griggs during the preceding month than she really had, and she got credit for comprehending, at least, the general drift of his ideas, beyond what she deserved. Wingfield looked at her in vain, and then broke the silence which had followed Griggs’ last speech.
“I wish one knew what to believe,” he said, formulating the nineteenth century’s dying question. “It’s not easy, you know, with all these theories about.”
Of the seven persons present there was not one whose convictions really coincided, even approximately, with any established form of belief. Yet all belonged to some one of the few principal Christian churches, by birth, early associations and youthful teaching.
Wingfield’s question was received in silence. His bold black eyes glanced from one to another of his companions, and the blood mounted slowly in his healthy brown cheeks, for he was young enough to fancy that some of these might have thought his remark futile or trivial and he did not wish to seem dull before Katharine.
She found herself in a strange position. By a very natural train of circumstances she was accidentally set up as a sort of idol that evening before the five men who, of all others, each in his own way, most sincerely loved and admired her. Secretly married to the one of them she loved, two of the others—Hamilton Bright and Wingfield—wished to marry her. Of the other two, Crowdie, the painter, admired her more than any woman he had ever seen, though he was undoubtedly in love with his wife. Had she been able to understand his admiration, it would have repelled her. Fortunately it was beneath her understanding. And to Griggs, weather-beaten, overworked, disenchanted of all that the world held, by reason of having had much of it either too early or too late, with his hard head and his dreamy mind and his almost supernaturally strong hands—to Griggs she represented something he would not have told then, but something which Katharine need not have been ashamed to hear of, nor her husband to tolerate. Ralston might even have found sympathy for him.
They all worshipped her in one way or another, though she was a very human girl of her time and place in the world. And somehow, in the silence which followed Griggs’ speech, broken only by Wingfield’s questioning remark, they all turned to her as he had done, as though in her face they sought the lost faith. Hard-headed men, some of them, too, and hard-fisted. The three eldest had each accomplished something. The two younger ones were perhaps on the way. They were rather typical men.
Katharine was vaguely conscious of their glances, and was the first to speak, after Wingfield.
“It’s what we all feel—what half the people we know feel, though they haven’t the courage to say it.”