Ralph wondered. "I've used doubtless plenty of expressions and in plenty of absurd ways. But what in the world was this one?"
She brought it responsibly out. "'The sense of the past'."
He wondered still more. "Is that all?"
"You said it was the thing in life you desired most to arrive at, and that wherever you had found it—even where it was supposed to be most vivid and inspired—it had struck you as deplorably lacking intensity. At the intensity required, as you said, by any proper respect for itself, you proposed if possible yourself to arrive—art, research, curiosity, passion, the historic passion, as you called it, helping you. From that moment," she went on, "I saw. The sense of the past is your sense."
He attended with a cold eye. "I haven't an idea what trash I may have talked."
"Don't be dishonest," she returned after a moment.
It brought, almost as a blow, a flush to his cheek. "Dishonest?"
"Don't deny yourself. Don't deny your ambition. Don't deny your genius."
He looked at her over it strangely, and then as if light had really broken, "Are those things what you hate me for?" he almost gasped.
"Live up to them," she returned as if she had not heard him. "You won't do anything else." She said it with a shortness that was almost stern, and he felt, detestably, as if she had but one moment instructed and at the other derided him. "Isn't that moreover quite the lesson of the chance, the one you just mentioned, of what you may come in for? Isn't an old property for you the very finger of fortune, the very 'lead' of providence? Profit for heaven's sake by your old property. It will open your eyes." She went on with widened looks which so further ennobled her face that they held him by themselves, standing out as he did from any truth in them. "That's what your little book itself says—your little book that's so wonderful for a man uninitiated; by which I venture to mean, you see, a man untravelled. It's apropos of what you call the 'backward vision,' and I could immediately find the page. 'There are particular places where things have happened, places enclosed and ordered and subject to the continuity of life mostly, that seem to put us into communication, and the spell is sometimes made to work by the imposition of hands, if it be patient enough, on an old object or an old surface.' It's very wonderful, you know, your having arrived at that, your having guessed it, in this place, which denies the old at every turn and contains so few such objects or surfaces." So she continued to comment. "I hope your old house will contain plenty of them."