Rising from her bed, she pored over the books on spiritualism that still formed a long row on the shelf of her writing desk. She envied the women who were reported to have received, through automatic writing, messages from the dead. She sat down, in the silence of the night, to hold over the clean sheet of paper the perpendicular pencil. With her head bowed forward, her pose an epitome of patience, she fixed her eyes upon the pencil point, which slowly made meaningless curlicues.
But suddenly, when she was expecting nothing, there passed through her a tingling warmth such as that which must pervade the earth at spring-time. She stared round the room with the thought, "His spirit is here!"
And she uttered, very distinctly, in the hope that the words might penetrate his world from hers:
"I love you as much as ever!"
Those moments became rare. At last they ceased to occur.
"He has passed so far into the beyond that he can no longer return to me."
As if it had been awaiting this acknowledgment, a thicker curtain descended between Lilla and the past.
And now she was like some medieval chatelaine who, emerging from a dark and lonely castle, views all the gewgaws that a far-wandering peddlar has spread out for her in the sun.
There were the art galleries filled with statues in inchoate or tortured forms, or with paintings that seemed to Lilla to have been conceived by madmen, yet in which certain persons declared that they could discern a sanity beyond the understanding of the age. And there were the concert halls given over to the very newest music, from which Lilla emerged with her nerves exacerbated.
Then the prosceniums of the theaters framed pageants of Oriental sensuousness—scenes of hallucinatory seductiveness and splendor, through which, to a blare of startling music, bounded swarms of half-naked bodies jingling with jewels.