She drew Julie’s arm up beside her own to the light. “Yours is snowy, way down to the depths; but the light stops under my skin, it can’t get down. That is the difference between you and me!” She loosed Julie abruptly. “Ah, well—you are blind. Go hold up the world, and break your poor little back, when you might be ruling the world, like me. All the East, you know, is mine to work my will in.”
Because Isabel was of that East, which she so fantastically claimed, Julie took lightly all she said. To boast of swaying empires and of taking kings out of their thrones was part of the inalienable imagery of the East, as were the widely unreal, the impossibly beautiful things in the old Chinese lyrics. Isabel implied that Julie had only to step out of her insignificant profession to find herself ruling the world, the world of to-day, which had such a marvelous capacity for ruling itself. It was strange how something at other moments so exalted could, under this woman’s manipulation, become all at once so obscure. Julie, turning to depart, thanked Isabel for the bracelet.
“Remember, I am your friend,” Isabel said, “and I will help you at any time you say so. Adios!”
Julie left her standing in the center of her magic chamber, its splendor hovering about her, her dark face merging into its richness like that of some forgotten goddess.
With his small powerful arms, the dwarf swung the gate open for her. She looked back at the garden starred with strange flowers, at the tiers of steps and bright pillars which made the house resemble a Babylonian palace, at the light of the stained glass under the blaze of sunlight: in that bizarre house had lived a woman who had gone out to the tops of mountains searching for spells!
In those moments when Julie cogitated upon matters of human life in connection with the Deity, she conceived Him rather vaguely as a sort of sublime executive, who drew up—sometimes perforce a little hurriedly perhaps—plans of eternal destiny for everybody. Dealing liberally in catastrophe, disease, old age, poverty, and death, He yet conceded, like allowances of candy to children, a certain amount of impermanent happiness; and it was into this arrangement of things that the race was privileged to enter.
She wondered, as she turned from Isabel’s gate, who the little Green God was; and whether he had any character by which he would be recognized in the West. She who had started out with a nameless exalted fervor, whose spirit had been skimming like an inspired comet through space, had been suddenly halted before a strange house in which she had encountered disquieting things—things which had brought the comet down to a scented and blooming earth. So do the moods of youth sway in the last wind blowing.
Still nothing caused Julie to change her intentions; not the troubled counsel of Father Hull, given in his tired voice; nor the Calixters’ tales of the far, fearful South; nor the exotic arguments listened to in the Babylonian house. She set sail for the South on the day that had been set.