Mona turned a pair of laughing eyes full on her friend.
"Remind me of it by all means. Go a stage farther back, if you like, and remind me of my dolls. I am not sensitive on either point. I was saying to some one only the other clay that it takes a great many incompatible utterances to make up a man's Credo, even at one moment. Perhaps," she added more slowly, "each of us is, in potentiality, as catholic as God Himself on a small scale; but owing to the restrictions and mutual pressure of human life, most of us can only develop one side at a time—some of us only one in a single 'Karma.'"
"You seem," said Doris quietly, "to have found the intellectual life at Borrowness at a surprisingly high level."
Mona raised her eyebrows with a quick, unconscious gesture.
"There are a few intelligent people," she said rather coldly, "even there."
"But, Mona, your life has been so free from restriction and pressure. You have been able to develop on the lines you chose."
"Don't argue that my responsibility is the greater! How do we know that it is not the less? Besides, there may be very real pressure and restriction, which is invisible even to the most sympathetic eye."
"I don't want to argue at all. I don't profess to follow all your flights; but I am perfectly satisfied that you will come back to the point you started from."
Mona rose and took down a plaid from the rack. "Make it a spiral, Doris, if you conscientiously can," she said gravely. "I don't like moving in a circle. 'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!'"
Doris looked admiringly at her friend. She could very conscientiously have "made it a spiral," but she was not in the habit of talking in metaphors as Mona was.