Miss Claes bent in low laughter.
“They start in killing out personality before they get a live one,” Pidge added sullenly.
“They do, my dear, but have you heard any words about the impersonal life from Nagar?”
“No. That’s the best thing about him—that he doesn’t explain himself. But I hate mysteries about Hindus—hate people moving about saying, ‘Shh-sh’—finger on their lips, trying to astonish you with something they can’t tell. I’m so tired of all that!”
“Still you asked me about Nagar, though really there is nothing to say, except that he is good to have in the house.”
“I think I’ll let him come and hear the reading, if he’s willing.”
“Good,” said Miss Claes. “We will listen in this room, where the story came to be.”
... Nagar sat in a straight chair, in the aisle between the cot and the wall. Pidge sat by the window before her machine. Miss Claes lay on the cot with her head under the light that Pidge read by, and away they went. There was an hour or more in the early afternoon when both Miss Claes and her helper could escape from below, and two hours, at least, after nine in the evening—this for three days.
Pidge was fagged and ill and frightfully scared. She would begin hoarsely, and for pages in each reading her cold in the head was an obstruction hard to pass; besides, she felt she was boring them horribly and that all the massed effects of her pages dithered away into nothing or worse. But a moment came in each of the six sessions, when the last monster of the mind’s outer darkness was passed. And then, for Pidge, at least, knighthood rose resplendent; days became stately, indeed, and chivalry bloomed again. At such times the dark gleaming hair of Miss Claes—which Pidge could have touched with her hand, became the tresses of Madelaine Rivernais herself, and a little back to the right in the deep shadows, the face of the Easterner there took on the magic and glamour of Lambill’s own. The vineyards of old France stretched beyond from their balcony; the rivers of France flowed below. The lance of the Rivernais was won back heroically and human hearts opened to the drama of love and life.