When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the fever of the last few days in watching the birds hopping and twittering among the crumbs that Mrs Bowater scattered out on the windowsill for my pleasure. And yet—their every virtue, every grace, Fanny Bowater, all were thine! The very snow, in my girlish fantasy, was the fairness beneath which the unknown Self in her must, as I fondly believed, lie slumbering; a beauty that hid also from me for a while the restless, self-centred mind. How believe that such beauty is any the less a gift to its possessor than its bespeckled breast and song to a thrush, its sheen to a starling? It is a riddle that still baffles me. If we are all shut up in our bodies as the poets and the Scriptures say we are, then how is it that many of the loveliest seem to be all but uninhabited, or to harbour such dingy tenants; while quite plain faces may throng with animated ghosts?
Fanny did not come to share my delight in the snow that morning. And as I looked out on it, waiting on in vain, hope flagged, and a sadness stole over its beauty. Probably she had not given the fantastic lodger a thought. She slid through life, it seemed, as easily as a seal through water. But I was not the only friend who survived her caprices. In spite of her warning about the dish-washing, Mr Crimble came to see her that afternoon. She was out. With a little bundle of papers in his hand he paused at the gate-post to push his spectacles more firmly on to his nose and cast a kind of homeless look over the fields before turning his face towards St Peter's. Next day, Holy Innocents', he came again; but this time with more determination, for he asked to see me.
To rid myself, as far as possible, of one piece of duplicity, I at once took the bull by the horns, and in the presence of Mrs Bowater boldly invited him to stay to tea. With a flurried glance of the eye in her direction he accepted my invitation.
"A cold afternoon, Mrs Bowater," he intoned. "The cup that cheers, the cup that cheers."
My landlady left the conventions to take care of themselves; and presently he and I found ourselves positively tête-à-tête over her seed cake and thin bread and butter.
But though we both set to work to make conversation, an absent intentness in his manner, a listening turn of his head, hinted that his thoughts were not wholly with me.
"Are you long with us?" he inquired, stirring his tea.
"I am quite, quite happy here," I replied, with a sigh.
"Ah!" he replied, a little wistfully, taking a sip, "how few of us have the courage to confess that. Perhaps it flatters us to suppose we are miserable. It is this pessimism—of a mechanical, a scientific age—which we have chiefly to contend against. We don't often see you at St Peter's, I think?"
"You wouldn't see very much of me, if I did come," I replied a little tartly. Possibly it was his "we" that had fretted me. It seemed needlessly egotistical. "On the other hand," I added, "wouldn't there be a risk of the congregation seeing nothing else?"