"Kiss me too, Constance," she whispered.
The embrace was fondly returned, and at this loosening of the tension of their strained spirits they wept gently in each other's arms. Then Mrs. Wilson added, "Come, let us go where we can talk. We could do nothing at present which my maid cannot do."
She led the way to her boudoir. The idea of seeking sleep had never occurred to either of them. Although Mrs. Wilson had felt the need of speech, it was some minutes after they had established themselves before she broke the silence. When she did so she spoke suddenly and with emotion, like one beset by a repugnant conviction yet loath to acknowledge it.
"Can I have deserved this, Constance?" The vivid protest in her companion's face made clear that Constance did not penetrate her subtler meaning, and she hastened to answer her own question.
"Not to be strangled by a violent lunatic," she said, raising a hand involuntarily to her neck. "But her words were a judgment—a lacerating judgment. How I should loathe it—to scrub dirty marble floors forever and ever. It is just that—the dirt, the disorder, the common reek, which I shrink from and shun in spite of myself. How did she ever find out? I love too much the lusciousness of life.
'It is the little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.'
Do you not see, Constance?"
Leaning forward with clasped hands and speaking with melodious pathos while the morning light rested on her tired but interesting face, her confession had the effect of a monologue save for its final question. And Constance, listening understood. In truth, this cry of the soul at bay came as a quickener to her own surging emotions, and she realized that the walls of the temple of beauty had fallen like those of Jericho at the trumpets of Israel. Yet though she understood and saw starkly revealed the limit of the gospel of the splendor of things, with all the purging of perplexities which that meant for her, the claims of gratitude and of unabated admiration no less than pity caused her to shrink from immediate acquiescence in her patron's self-censure. And as she hesitated for the proper antidote, Mrs. Wilson pursued her confession relentlessly—pursued it, however, as one who recites the weakness of a cause to which she is hopelessly committed.
"One is spurred to refine and refine and refine,—does not even religion—my religion—so teach us?—the spirit ostensibly, and, in order to reach the spirit, the body; and in this age of things and of great possessions one reaches greedily after the quintessence of comfort until—until one needs some shock like this to perceive that one might become—perhaps is, an intellectual sybarite. Nay, more; though we crave almost by instinct individual lustre and personal safety, reaching out for luxury that we may grow superfine, must not we—we American women with ideals—mistrust the social beauty of a universe which still produces the masses and all the horrors of life? Can it fundamentally avail that a few should be exquisite and have radiant thoughts, if the rest are condemned to a coarse, unlovely heritage?"
Not only did gratitude reassert itself as Constance listened to this speculative plaint, but protesting common sense as well, which recognized the morbidness of the thought without ignoring its cogency.