Mrs. Savage threw away her cigarette impatiently.
"You're a child! And a silly child! Your friend, Lord Summertown—well, I suppose none of you told him what he had said. And I suppose he enjoyed his life to the end. The whole future! Would you like to know that you will marry in a year and be happy and lose your husband after three months and lose your child and marry again—perhaps, this time, some one who will not make you happy? And that then you will have an illness or this or that?... I am talking for your good, because you are nothing but a silly child. I tell you that people will not be persuaded to say to me all they know; they dare not face it. Their present and future happiness——"
"I'm not so very happy," sighed Barbara.
"You are a child. And your friends are being killed, perhaps some one whom you love——"
"I want to know," Barbara interrupted. "Everything's in such a muddle, I want to know what's going to happen...." She paused, but Mrs. Savage only shook her head. "Should I know what I was telling you? No! Lord Summertown didn't. Well, you need only tell me back the things that matter. If you ask me questions and I answer them.... Perhaps I don't want to know if I'm going to die within a year, but there are all sorts of things that I could quite well be told.... Will you do that? Just the things that matter?"
"But I do not know what matters to you. Do you mean, whether your—friends will come through the war without injury?"
"Ye-es. That sort of thing. I want to know if I'm going to be happy. Generally."
"And you believe that I can help you?" Mrs. Savage's voice was changing its quality to a sleepy drone, and Barbara found herself looking into her eyes. "Only you can tell me what you think will make you happy. I know nothing about you except what you tell me. Perhaps you are in love with some man, perhaps you think that he is in danger.... If you will tell me...."
Barbara never knew at what point she began to come under the influence of Mrs. Savage's eyes and voice. At one moment she was begging her to use her powers, at another she was talking very volubly; it was like a dream in which she fancied herself making a speech; words were pouring out of her, and she was astonished to find that they made the nonsense of words in a dream. "The distinction between the articles in counterpoint, if you think of heliotrope quite accidentally included...."