"Good again," said Isabel. "How clever of her! Don't you feel how right she is? We are all like that wall-paper, and everything we care about is like it. The New Spirit--that is, the devil--is in that wall-paper. A psychometrist could detect Wagner and Keats, and Schopenhauer, and Rossetti and Swinburne, and all the rest of them in that wall-paper, just as surely as he could have detected Tupper and Eliza Cook in the wall-papers of 1851. Am I not right?"
"If we could only paper New Zion like this!" exclaimed Theophil, a curious new feeling of joy and pain shooting through him to hear a woman thus expressing herself as an independent brain.
"Yes! New Zion! I'd quite forgotten all about New Zion. It seems impossible to think of you together."
"And a little absurd, I suppose," said Theophil.
"It is uncouth material, I admit," he continued, "and yet somehow it amuses us to mould it all the more; and then you mustn't forget that we had been given no other--but I don't suppose you can understand?" (Theophil often used "we" in this imperatorial sense, meaning himself, as of course he had every right to mean.)
"O yes, but I can," Isabel hastened to correct. "I understand power."
"Beauty always does," was the young minister's reply.
"Besides," he presently resumed, "we are glad to have been Nonconformists--once. A Puritan training is a good thing--to look back upon. You are all the more thorough in your pleasures, the truer humanist, for something of it still lurking in your blood."
"Yes, of course you're right. I don't like the word 'pagan'; but for want of a better, we might say that the best pagans have come of Puritan stock. Besides, it is half the romance of life to have something to escape from, isn't it?"
"And someone to escape with the other half," responded Theophil, nimble as a real town wit.