“You might read the history through once more with the greatest advantage. No writer that I know will reveal to you more of the conflict of human passions, excepting, of course, John Bunyan.”
The good pastor did not know many writers. He was not by any means a literary man.
Miss Mopius sailed into the room unannounced, and interrupted their quiet conversation. Two little peculiarities of this lady’s—trifles, light as air—were a source of unending irritation to her brother-in-law. The one was her tacit refusal to prelude her invasions of his sanctum, the other was her persistent drawl of his soldierly name into a sound which was neither French nor English, nor anything but absurd. The Dominé was a brave man; he was exceedingly afraid of his dead wife’s sister, not so much on account of himself as on account of the use to which Diabolus put her in the great siege of the Dominé’s Mansoul.
By sheer force of will Miss Mopius had taught herself to admit that she was thirty-two years old, but she would never see forty again. She was endowed with a sallow complexion, to which she had added auburn ringlets and rainbow-colored raiment. To describe her as an entirely imaginary invalid would have been malevolent; nature had provided her with a tendency to nervous headaches which kindly fostering had developed into a vocation.
She had come to the widower as a thorn in the flesh. Limp and listless, absolutely unable to “resist” anything that attracted her, she devoted herself day and night to the harassing service of her own caprices. Being not entirely destitute of means, she might easily have enjoyed her nerves to the full in some boarding-house, but she knew her duty to her motherless niece.
“I should not stay with you, Roderigue,” she was wont to say, “though Ursula, of course, will not marry for many years yet. When she does, I shall consider my mission is ended. I should not be wanted then.”
She paused, expectant. But the Dominé never answered, for he held that, in the spiritual warfare, a falsehood is the easiest and most cowardly method of running away.
“Ursula, my dear,” began Miss Mopius, in a flow of sugared vinegar, “I have been suffering the greatest anxiety. I thought you had not returned. I suppose, however, the train was late.”
Ursula, rising hastily, confessed that the train had been punctual.
“Really! Well, I’m afraid I interrupted you. This conversation must have been of the greatest importance, or you would hardly have so entirely forgotten your poor old aunt.” Miss Mopius constantly used that appellation; of late she had sometimes wondered whether it was becoming unwise. She spoke in almost continuous italics; these, however, were mostly independent of sense.