Happy for us if we can bury our dead decently; but bury them never so deep, they rise and walk down the vistas of our happiest hours, infecting their sunshine with the pollution of dead faith.
During these long walks together Vashti and Sidney talked much, and of more vital subjects than are generally discussed between young men and women. The fashionable chit-chat about theatres and plays, receptions and fashions was utterly missed from their calendar of subjects.
Now and then, Sidney, being a man, could not forbear to let her know how beautiful he found her; but empty compliment, the clipped coin of conversational commerce, he did not offer her; nothing but pure gold minted by her sweet looks in his heart was worthy of her acceptance. Thus they fell back upon the old immortal themes which have been discussed since the world began. They looked at life from widely different standpoints, but their conclusions were equally forceful.
Vashti Lansing had nothing of the simpering school-girl about her, and none of the fear which makes women reticent sometimes when speech would be golden.
It has been said that to know the Bible and Shakespeare is to have a good English vocabulary. Vashti did not know Shakespeare, but she knew her Bible thoroughly. Her speech, unweakened by the modern catch-words which, if expressive, are yet extraneous and dangerous growths, had all the trenchant force of the old Anglo-Saxon, with much in it too of imagery and beauty; for she did not fear to use such metaphors as nature or life suggested. Steeped in the stern Mosaic law, she knew well the stately periods of its prophets. The gentle Christ-creed of forgiveness did not find favour in her sight. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was a judgment which she said only timorous souls feared. She read with grim delight the tales of the kings, with their feet upon their captives’ necks; an evil sympathy with their triumph lighted her eyes with wicked light. What a spouse she would have been for one of these cruel kings! she thought sometimes. And she applied a relentless utilitarian philosophy to life. The weakest go to the wall and the strong triumph. She accepted that with the stoicism which springs from conscious strength, but in her system she rather confused strength with righteousness. She watched the movings of life about her with cold, curious eyes, and yet her philosophy of life was but an expanded egotism. She comprehended only those sets of actions which might have taken place had she given free rein to her own inclinations; she judged of all motives by the repressed impulses of her own bosom. She scrutinized others unsparingly, prying into the most sacred griefs, the most holy joy without shame or remorse, and she did not spare herself more than others.
The dim, terrifying impulses and visions which girls put behind them, shudderingly and uncomprehendingly, hiding them away with the other spectres which people the realm of the unknown, until such time as life’s meanings shall be expounded in a sacred mystery play of sense and spirit, she marshalled forth into the light of day and considered calmly and cynically.
She applied the foot-rule of her own lymphatic temperament to the morals of her fellows and was never disappointed when they fell short. She was well versed in all the wisdom of the Pharisees, and at the sewing circle talked always to the older women, and was never found in the corner where the clear-eyed girls whispered together.
And quickening and vitalizing all her existence there was that sense of Power. Power uncomprehended, undeveloped, yet there; and as a thunder-cloud gives premonition of its potent force even before the brand leaps from its cloudy sheath, so Vashti Lansing’s personality was instinct with potentiality.