Nicholas stared.
“Listen,” said Trix.
CHAPTER XXXV
TRIX TRIUMPHANT
It was more than an hour before Trix departed, exultant, rejoicing.
Nicholas sat staring at the chair she had just vacated. He had been bewitched, utterly bewitched, and he knew it. Her vitality, her insistence had carried him with her despite himself,—that and an odd under-current of something he could not entirely explain. He might have called it faith, only it was not faith as he had been accustomed to think of it, when he thought at all. It was so infinitely more alive and personal. And yet she had only once touched on what he would have termed religion.
“You’ve wandered entirely from the object of your visit,” he had remarked at one point in the conversation, “and I can’t for the life of me see why you are taking this extraordinary interest in what you consider my welfare. What on earth can it matter to any one else, how I choose to live my life?”
“Ah, but it does matter,” she had answered earnestly, “it matters quite supremely. I know we often pretend to ourselves that it doesn’t in the least matter how we live our lives so long as we don’t commit actual sin; but we can’t isolate ourselves from others without loss to them and to ourselves.”