Not long after this, Mr. Chilvers paid a call at the conventional hour. Sidwell, hoping to escape, invited two girls to step out with her on to the lawn. The sun was sinking, and, as she stood with eyes fixed upon it, the Rev. Bruno's voice disagreeably broke her reverie. She was perforce involved in a dialogue, her companions moving aside.
'What a magnificent sky!' murmured Chilvers. '"There sinks the nebulous star." Forgive me, I have fallen into a tiresome trick of quoting. How differently a sunset is viewed nowadays from what it was in old times! Our impersonal emotions are on a higher plane—don't you think so? Yes, scientific discovery has done more for religion than all the ages of pious imagination. A theory of Galileo or Newton is more to the soul than a psalm of David.'
'You think so?' Sidwell asked, coldly.
In everyday conversation she was less suave than formerly. This summer she had never worn her spray of sweet-brier, and the omission might have been deemed significant of a change in herself. When the occasion offered, she no longer hesitated to express a difference of opinion; at times she uttered her dissent with a bluntness which recalled Buckland's manner in private.
'Does the comparison seem to you unbecoming?' said Chilvers, with genial condescension. 'Or untrue?'
'What do you mean by "the soul"?' she inquired, still gazing away from him.
'The principle of conscious life in man—that which understands and worships.'
'The two faculties seem to me so different that'——She broke off. 'But I mustn't talk foolishly about such things.'
'I feel sure you have thought of them to some purpose. I wonder whether you ever read Francis Newman's book on The Soul?'
'No, I never saw it.'