“I don’t think I do; but I know I am an Agnostic. Nepenthe has unsettled all my old beliefs. If I had read it four years ago I should have refused to be confirmed. I am dying to know the author.”
“You like unbelievers, then?” said Mr. Greswold.
“I adore men who dare to doubt, who are not afraid to stand apart from their fellow-men.”
“On a bad eminence?”
“Yes, on a bad eminence. What a sweet expression! I can never understand Goethe’s Gretchen.”
“Why not?”
“How could she have cared for Faust, when she had the privilege of knowing Mephistopheles?”
Pamela Ransome had established herself in her pretty bedroom and dressing-room, and had supervised her maid while she unpacked and arranged all her belongings, before dinner-time. She came down to the drawing-room, at a quarter to eight, as thoroughly at her ease as if she had lived half her life at Enderby Manor. She was a kind of visitor who gives no trouble, and who drops into the right place instinctively. Mildred Greswold felt cheered by her presence, in spite of that ever-recurrent pang of memory which associated all young bright things with the sweet girl-child who should have grown to womanhood under that roof, and who was lying a little way off, under the ripening berries of the mountain-ash, and in the deep shadow of a century-old yew.
They were very quiet in the drawing-room after dinner; Greswold reading in a nook apart, by the light of his own particular lamp; his wife bending over an embroidery-frame in her corner near the piano, where she had her own special dwarf bookcase and her work-basket, and the bonheur du jour at which she sometimes wrote letters, her own little table scattered with old family miniatures by Angelica Kaufmann, Cosway, and Ross, and antique watches in enamelled cases, and boxes of porcelain and gold and silver, every one of which had its history. Every woman who lives much at home has some such corner, where the very atmosphere is full of home thoughts. She asked her niece to play, and to go on playing as long as she liked; and Pamela, pleased with the touch of the Broadwood grand, rang the changes upon Chopin, Schumann, Raff, and Brahm, choosing those compositions which least jarred upon the atmosphere of studious repose.