Then she too, left the room; as for once the talk had been pregnant, and she wanted to think.
Sexual desires concealed under mystical experiences ... a Eucharistic play. Unamuno said that the Eucharist owed its potency to the fact that it stood for immortality, for life. But it was also, she realised, the “bread not made of wheat,” therefore it must stand for the man-made things as well—these vain yet lovely yearnings that differentiate him from flowers and beasts, and which are apt to run counter to the life he shares with these. The Eucharist, then, could stand either for life, the blind biological force, or for the enemy of life—the dreams and shadows that haunt the soul of man; the enemy of that blind biological force, yes, but also its flower, because it grows out of it....
2
The days of Christmas week passed in walks, dancing, and talk in the billiard-room.
On Christmas Day Rory had given Concha a volume of the Harrow songs with music, and to the Doña an exquisite ivory hand-painted eighteenth-century fan with which she was extremely pleased; indeed, to Teresa’s surprise, he had managed to get into her good graces, and they had started a little relationship of their own consisting of mock gallantry on his side and good-natured irony on hers.
As to Concha, she had taken complete possession of him and seemed to know as much about his relations—“Uncle Jimmy,” “old Lionel Fane” and the rest of them—as he did himself; she knew, too, who had been his fag at Harrow and the names of all his brother officers; in fact, the sort of things that, hitherto, she had only known about Arnold; and Arnold evidently was not overpleased.
One day a little incident occurred in connection with Arnold that touched Teresa very much. Happening to want something out of her room she found its entry barred by him and the Doña, she superintending, while he was nailing on to the door a small piece of canvas embroidered with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
“We won’t be a minute,” said the Doña serenely; and Arnold, scowling and rather red, silently finished his job. By the end of the morning there was not a room in the house that had not the Sacred Heart nailed on its door. Dick being by this time too cowed to protest.
Teresa knew how Arnold must have loathed it; but he evidently meant by his co-operation to make it clear once and for all that he was on his mother’s side in the present crisis as opposed to his father’s.