"One must believe that she sees it," Lilla assented, and, frozen by her thoughts, shuddered violently. "Yes, too uncanny! She did well to give it up."
"Especially as people were getting to be afraid of her," said Fanny Brassfield, while passing through the front doorway.
CHAPTER XXXVI
While David worked behind the closed doors of the study, Lilla, sitting down in a damask-covered chair, tried to concentrate her mind on the new books from New York.
She skimmed the novels to the point where the lovers had their first embrace, then turned to poems by women, which were pervaded with a melancholy derived perhaps from disillusionment. As a corrective she read the books on world politics, economics, esthetic philosophy. In these last she found, eloquently expressed, the most characteristic argument of the times—a persuasion to that self-abandonment which follows materialism and moral skepticism, an announcement that happiness lay in a religion of the senses, in becoming, indeed, "divinely animal."
As she laid down the book, there returned to her the words that a young Roman had poured into her ears one night on Lake Como:
"The splendors of this world and our acceptance of them. Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand generations have made so complex."
Of a sudden New York rose before her, bathed in the glitter from its lights, ringing with music and laughter. She saw the multitudes of pleasure seekers streaming hither and thither, immersing themselves in startling hues and sounds, in abnormal spectacles and freshly discovered impulses, which the priests of this new-old cult provided for them benignly in ever more exacerbating forms and combinations. There, possibly, amid those emotions gradually approaching a Dionysiac frenzy, was the logical Mecca of her long pilgrimage, the end of all this hunger for sensuous reactions—for the pleasures that came from strange fragrances and harmonies, from contacts with precious fabrics and the patina of perfect porcelains, from the perception of matchless color in painted canvas and gems, or from the grace that was fluent in the moving bodies of human beings and beasts?
She rose, turning away from those books, and from the room full of objects whose textures were finer and more lasting than flesh. Crossing the hall, she entered the fernery, where palms rose against the stone arches of the windows, and hanging baskets overflowed with long tendrils above a wicker couch that was covered with red cushions. It was the last refuge of the flowers. Beyond the leaded panes some snowflakes were floating down upon the flagstone paths of the garden.