After we had started toward Santo Espiritu, a delicate rosy afterglow succeeded the abrupt gray interval, but our backs were now turned upon it, and we only glanced at it now and then over our shoulders.
“The silence said to me,” Cornelia resumed, “that I had been a very foolish woman, because I had expected of a human companionship an intimacy of sympathy and understanding which only a Divine companionship can give.”
“How do you know, Cornelia? How do you know?”
“I don’t know how it is with you—with men. Maybe a man can fill his life so full of the things he is doing—with work and ambition and the improvement of the world—that he doesn’t have to have an ‘inner life.’ For me, for most women, there has to be an inner life. We live so much in our personal relations; and I, at any rate, can’t live my life unless I feel every day, all the time, my relation to something that is peaceful and beautiful and good, and that doesn’t change.”
“Have you really found it? Are you really happy—Bluebird?”
“I like to have you call me Bluebird,” she said. “I feel like one. I have never been so happy in my life as in this last month, since I have learned to keep the mood, the adorable mood, of the silence here by the sea.”
“I guess,” I said, “I caught a bit of it—your mood, to-night. But I know it won’t stay. It’s a mood that I can’t count on. And I don’t have it—often. Perhaps my setting isn’t right. At any rate I don’t seem able to establish the relations which you think are so important. So, with me, the mood is a lovely fugitive.”
“I have it all the time,” said Cornelia eagerly, “since I began to fill, really fill, my life with the things I love, and to leave the rest out: walking alone on the mesa; and being with the children; and talking with my sister and Mr. Blakewell (he’s really a most unusual young man); and going to church in the dear little church here in La Jolla. I always liked to go to church: it made everything seem so certain and peaceful afterward—till Oliver and the children began to argue. And I liked religious music and the little choir boys in white and the lovely procession of them singing. It put me into a frame of mind that I knew was right, because it harmonized perfectly with all the things that I wanted to have in my mind, and it shut the other things out.”
“When did this new mood begin?” I questioned.
“It wasn’t,” she said, “a very serious matter with me till this last spring. Other things than attending church had put me in the same frame of mind. But after our trouble began and especially after Oliver—went to Paris, and I felt so desperately isolated, isolated inside, I mean, I went to church very regularly, and I began to attend early communion, and often to go into the cathedral and sit for half an hour when no one was there. And by and by the horrible sense of isolation left me. Something came in and filled up the vacancy. I couldn’t see just why—nothing had changed; and in the first month after he left, I hadn’t heard a word from Oliver except by his postcards to the children, but somehow I didn’t care whether I heard from Oliver or not; and somehow I was growing happy, positively happy, and clear and certain in my own mind. The ‘mood’ stayed. I know why, now; and now—you may think I am foolish, but now—I have only to go into our little church and touch anything there, or just sit still alone in the dusk, to feel ecstatically happy.”