"Ah! just Heaven—and what things, then?" poor Adrian exclaimed, distraction again threatening him.
"She would, I think, have very great difficulty in telling you."
Here distraction did more than threaten. It jumped on him, so that in his agitation he positively bounced, ball-like, upon the seat of the sofa.
"I knew it," he cried. "I was sure of it. Almost immediately I detected an alien and inimical influence intrude itself between us, as I have already told you, and battle against me. And this was the more detestable to me because I felt powerless to combat it, being ignorant whence it came and what its nature actually was."
Miss Beauchamp looked at him indulgently. And he, distraction notwithstanding, perceived that her countenance once more had grown sibylline. This served sensibly to quiet and steady him.
"I fancy that influence comes from very deep and very far," she said. "A woman of so much temperament and so much intelligence as Gabrielle St. Leger must, of necessity, be the child of the age in which she lives, in touch with the spirit of it. Her eyes are turned toward the future, and the strange unrestful wind, the wind of Modernity, which blows from out the future, is upon her face. This is the influence you have to battle against, my dear young man, I am afraid, nothing less than the Spirit of the Age, the spirit of Modernity. You have your work cut out for you! To combat it successfully will be—to put it vulgarly—a mighty tough job."
"Like King David of old, I'd rather fall into the hands of God than into those of man," Adrian returned, with rather rueful humor.
"Is one so very sure they are the hands of the Almighty? Too often one has reason to suspect they belong to exactly the opposite person—the inspirer—namely, of so many of your friend M. René Dax's unpardonable caricatures. But there," she added, "I don't want to give place to prejudice; though whether Modernity is veritably the highroad to the state of human earthly felicity its exponents so confidently—and truculently—predict, or not rather to some appalling and final catastrophe, some Armageddon, and Twilight of the Gods, appears to me, in the existing stage of its evolution, open to the liveliest question. Fortunately, at my time of life one is free to stand aside and look on, passively awaiting the event without taking part in the production of it. But with Madame St. Leger, as with yourself, it is different. You are on the active list. Whether you like or not, you are bound to participate in the production of the event—and she, at least, is by no means unwilling to do so."
"But how, chère Mademoiselle, but how?" Adrian questioned.
"After a fashion you can hardly be expected to indorse enthusiastically."