And turning on his elbows beside her, he put her through a catechism as to her village, her uncle, her friends. She resisted a little, for the brusque assurance of his tone still sounded oddly in her American ear. But he was not easy to resist; and when she had yielded she soon discovered that to talk to him was a no less breathless and absorbing business than to listen to him. He pounced on the new, the characteristic, the local; he drew out of her what he wanted to know; he made her see her own trees and fields, the figures of her home, with new sharpness, so quick, so dramatic, so voracious, one might almost say, were his own perceptions.
Especially did he make her tell him of the New England winter; of the long pauses of its snow-bound life; its whirling winds and drifts; its snapping, crackling frosts; the lonely farms, and the deep sleigh-tracks amid the white wilderness, that still in the winter silence bind these homesteads to each other and the nation; the strange gleams of moonrise and sunset on the cold hills; the strong dark armies of the pines; the grace of the stripped birches. Above all, must she talk to him of the people in these farms, the frugal, or silent, or brooding people of the hills; honourable, hard, knotted, prejudiced, believing folk, whose lives and fates, whose spiritual visions and madnesses, were entwined with her own young memories and deepest affections.
Figure after figure, story after story, did he draw from her,—warm from the hidden fire of her own strenuous, loving life. Once or twice she spoke of her mother—like one drawing a veil for an instant from a holy of holies. He felt and saw the burning of a sacred fire; then the veil dropped, nor would it lift again for any word of his. And every now and then, a phrase that startled him by its quality,—its suggestions. Presently he was staring at her with his dark absent eyes.
'Heavens!'—he was thinking—'what a woman there is in her!—what a nature!'
The artist—the poet—the lover of things significant and moving,—all these were stirred in him as he listened to her, as he watched her young and noble beauty.
* * * * *
But, in the end, he would not grant her much, argumentatively.
'You make me see strange things—magnificent things, if you like! But your old New England saints and dreamers are not your last word in America. They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,—science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there—there—I'll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care! I have seen you a Catholic once, for three minutes!'
'When?'
'In St. Peter's.'