Her own bright room filled her eyes again, and the ashen horror on the countenance of Madame Nestor, who seemed vaguely to see it all.
"I think I should have gone to him," Paula murmured, in the slow, flat tone of one not yet quite normally conscious.
"There is but one way, you poor distressed child—to build about you a fortress of purity—which he cannot penetrate——"
"I think I should have known the car to take—the place to enter," Paula went on, unheeding, "the elevator entrance—the door of the room——"
Madame Nestor continued to implore her to pray. Paula shivered finally, and stared at the other for a few seconds, as if recalling the words the visitor had spoken, and the past she had lived with Bellingham. Her terrible rage toward herself spread and covered Madame Nestor. Did not the latter still dip here, there, and everywhere in the occult and weird? Might she not have something to do with the projectiles of Desire?
"I think I'd better be alone now," she said hoarsely. "One does not feel like invoking the Pure Presence—when one is chosen for such defilement."
THIRD CHAPTER
CERTAIN DEVELOPING INCIDENTS ARE CAUGHT INTO THE CURRENT OF NARRATIVE—ALSO A SUPPER WITH REIFFERSCHEID
In the week that followed, Paula's review of Quentin Charter's new book appeared. As a bit of luxury reading, she again went over "A Damsel Came to Peter." It stood up true and strong under the second reading—the test of a real book. The Western writer became a big figure in her mind. She thought of him as a Soul; with a certain gladness to know that he was Out There; that he refused to answer the call of New York; that he had waited until he was an adult to make his name known, and could not now be cramped and smothered and spoiled. There was a sterilized purity about parts of his work—an uncompromising thunder against the fleshly trends of living—to which she could only associate asceticism, celibacy, and mystic power. He was altogether an abstraction, but she was glad that he lived—in the West and in her brain.