A sharp wail smote the air from a point close to the lath and canvas partition, on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and steps in the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe that Mrs. Sand seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at which Mr. Harris shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed into silence, looking sternly at an advertisement. The air was full of their mutual annoyance, although Duff tried to feel amused. They were raging as primitively, under the red flannel shirt and the tan-coloured waistcoat with white silk spots, as two cave-men on an Early British coast; their only sophistication lay in Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he ought to find this person humorous. Then Laura came back and resolved the situation.
“Here it is,” she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; “we have all enjoyed it. Thank you very much.” There was in it the oddest mixture of the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris, as he took the book, had no alternative.
“Good-evening, then, Captain,” said he, and went, stumbling at the door.
“Mr. Harris,” said Laura equably, “found salvation about a month ago. He is a very steady young man—foreman in one of the carriage works here. He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he often drops in in the evening.”
“He seems to be a—a member of the corps,” said Lindsay.
“He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign doesn't think there's any objection.”
Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cheap little chairs, her sari drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated ambitions seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with anything else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him seemed to resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something disappointingly thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a unit in a glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her knowledge or her desire. This brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how far he had depended on her interest for his soul's sake to introduce her to a wider view of him.
“But you have come to tell me about yourself,” she said, suddenly it seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile. “Well, is there any special stumbling-block?”
“There are some things I should certainly like you to know,” replied Lindsay; “but you can't think how difficult—” he glanced at the lath and plaster partition, but she to whom publicity was a condition salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no interpretation for that.
“I know it's sometimes hard to speak,” she said; “Satan ties our tongues.”