The hot blood rushed into her face, the red fire of conscious guilt that always came at the thought of Claude Rutherford. She had never minimised her sin. It was sin to have made him essential to her happiness, to have lost interest in all the rest of her life, to have given him her heart and mind.
"I think the psychological moment has come," continued Symeon's slow, grave voice, "and that you should now become one of us. You have drained the cup of this trivial life, and have found its bitterness. Our religion is our faith in the After-life. We have the faith that looks through death. The orthodox Christian talks of the life beyond; and we must give him credit for sometimes thinking of it—but does he realise it? Is it near him? Does he look through death to the Spirit-world beyond? Does he realise the After-life as Christ realised it when He talked with His disciples?"
CHAPTER IX
The meeting in Mr. Symeon's library lasted all through the summer afternoon, till the edge of evening. The large and gloomy room was darkened by Venetian shutters, nearly closed over open windows. There was air, and the ceaseless sound of traffic; but the summer sun was excluded, and figures were seen dimly, as if they belonged to the shadow world.
Among those indistinct forms Vera recognised people she knew, people she would never have expected to find in a society of mystics: a statesman, a poet, three popular novelists, and half a dozen of the idlest women of her acquaintance, two of whom were the heroines of romantic stories, women over whose future friends watched and prophesied with the keen interest that centres in a domestic situation where catastrophe seems imminent.
Vera wondered, seeing these two. Had they come, like her, for a refuge from the tragedy of life? They had not come for an escape from sin; for, if their friends were to be believed, the border line had been passed long ago.
An hour of silence, broken now and then by deep breathing, as of agitation, and sometimes by a stifled sob, and then a flood of words, speech that was eloquent enough to seem inspired, speech that might have come from him who wrote "Christmas Eve," and "Easter Day," and "A Death in the Desert," the speech of a believer in all that is most divine in the promise of a future life. And after that burst of impassioned utterance there were other speakers, men and women, the men strong in faith, strong in the gift of tongues, possessed by the higher mind that spoke through organs of common clay; the women semi-hysterical, romantic, eloquent with remembered poetry. But in men and women alike there was sincerity, an intense belief in that close contact of disembodied mind, sincerity that carried conviction to an imaginative neophyte like Vera Provana.