This was Julie’s first opportunity to unburden her soul, and she was still surcharged with what had happened. Some one else might be able to understand; some one else might be able to make things clear. So under the stimulus of Isabel’s fragrant liqueur her innermost amazements and hurts burst into speech.
Isabel’s blue eyes lost their dreamy expression, and came acutely awake, her cigarette burned unheeded, while Julie’s sorrows, perplexities, and final confoundment of soul passed in array before her. When the girl had finished and had sunk back into the old stupid questioning wonder, Isabel exclaimed:
“Great is the Green God! Never say he is not kind. Surely he led you out of it. Don’t regret the stone image that let you starve under its eyes! There was more to come, little Atlas. You have something different in you—something very nearly divine. I feel it at my finger’s ends; though I don’t want it to come any nearer than that poetical distance. It is bringing you some place, and it was not meant that your destiny should halt where you perhaps believe it should. I am a prophet, you see. If I were not Empress of the East, as they say, I should travel as a prophetess through the land—like my mother. You have heard of her—how she gave up her wealth to wander and foretell? She too dreams of the Victorious East.”
Julie regarded this magnificence of mood with wonder. All manner of men, it was said, had loved Isabel; and in some peculiar way their lives had seemed to be bound up in her colorful personality—as if her sphinx-like spirit had devoured and assimilated their souls. Her mood was always an extravagant expectation of more than could be reasonably aspired to by any one person.
“Ah, what do you know about men?” Isabel suddenly exclaimed. “To hear you is like listening to the forgotten primer of one’s childhood. Nevertheless, there was long ago just such another as yourself, one as piteously credulous and blind.”
Suddenly an alien Isabel rose before the girl, an apparition of which the suppressed terribleness frightened her as if some strange phœnix had risen from its ashes before her eyes.
“You have told me your story. Now I shall tell you one of mine—a buried story of my old, old self. There are perhaps many turns yet in the course, but long after I shall have forgotten everything else, this one memory somehow shall remain.
“Maybe I had the promise of a soul then. I was a little Eurasian, with the happy blood of both races charging gayly through my veins. And I believed tremendously, Atlas, just like you. Ah—!
“I was born in this house of my ancestors. My father was a Scotchman, of their best clan; my mother was of the East. All its bloods flowed in her veins. I was taken young to England—and there,” Isabel said slowly, “my mother disappeared. I came to love my father’s land. I went to the schools there, and dreamed great things. Sometime I too should play a fine part in the world. Every man, I thought, had his destiny in his own hands.
“It was all a long time ago. Of the seasons I remember vividly only the time when the primroses open and the English hedge-lark is aboard.” A fierce blue mist veiled the flashing eyes. “Life dies and resurrects itself in England. Every year one is born anew.