“I shall not have them long. I am a woman and take on the colour of my habitation.”
“You are a woman and will die hard—unless you make a dash for the open air, for freedom.” He spoke tranquilly, with calculation. Mrs. Wilbur started as though he had blundered upon a secret, not confessed even to herself.
“Freedom! I have been making disturbances all my life to be free. And what have I done? I am not worth it.”
“Some people must get their freedom, no matter how they take it!”
“It isn’t merely the art, or the excitement of intellectual life, which I crave so much. There are other things no one can know. I am sinking, sinking—”
“Why struggle so futilely? Isn’t there a simpler, more direct way?” Erard fixed his eyes on her face while he made his proposal of mastership. Mrs. Wilbur flushed slowly without speaking. He continued after a momentary pause, “If you crave the other life.” And the silence seemed to say, if you would consent to the adultery of minds; if you would become once more my follower, my pupil. “This is mephitic for some people, you and me for example,” Erard went on slowly, “who have the necessity to think and feel, who care only for thought and feeling.”
How far her pent-up soul would have pushed her it is hard to say, if Molly Parker, looking about the house for Mrs. Wilbur, had not found them at this juncture, with intent, serious faces, hushed with their talk. She slipped over to her friend, and taking the earnest face daintily between her hands, kissed it here and there.
“Getting yourself all fussed up over art and emotions,” she commented with imperturbable freedom. “You don’t know that there’s been a great fire over in the stockyards district; burned out four blocks. A whole village full of people are homeless. You can still see the light in the sky from the west windows.”
From the dining-room windows the angry glow against the dull sky seemed only a few blocks away. Now and then a stream of full-bodied, serpentlike fire leapt up to lick a stretch of wall still standing. Then as a black stream of water fell on the fire, there was a momentary darkness until the caldron light from the interior shot the ascending smoke and steam with a lovely, controlled glow.
“It looks so near,” Molly Parker shivered. “Oh! the poor people!”