And Manon had knelt in the ruined church of Beaucourt and then told him with a child’s frankness that her religion was her own. Of course it was hers. She was as full of religion as the soil was full of spring. She had not been smothered in a town. She did not sell herself; there was more than mere sense under her petticoat. She had a soul.
“Queer, isn’t it?” thought Brent. “A modern man would think you were a bit cracked if you started talking about a soul. A few hundred years ago he would have felt insulted if you had taken it for granted that he hadn’t one. We’re too damned clever; that’s what’s the matter with us.”
Yet he went to bed a mixture of mystic and materialist. One of the blankets had the faint perfume of Manon’s clothes.
“Smells like the spring,” he said to himself.
And then he fell to gloating over that mass of wood and iron he had stacked in the rooms above.
“Well, what about it?” was the retort of the mystic-materialist. “Even a Bradbury has a potential soul. Depends on what you do with it, of course.”
Manon, meanwhile, was sitting in Madame Castener’s cottage at Ste. Claire. She had reached the hill above Ste. Claire about noon, and had looked down on the village flashing its white walls behind the sun-splashed tops of the poplars. The completeness and the unravaged tranquillity of Ste. Claire had shocked her a little after the ruins of Beaucourt. What luck there had been in the war! Yes, but Beaucourt and its wrecked houses had produced Paul Brent, and to Manon—the woman—Paul Brent had begun to matter.
Veuve Castener’s Flemish face hung out a look of massive surprise when Manon walked into the cottage.
“What! You back?”
“Yes, I am here,” said Manon to this obvious lady; “have I changed?”