“Oh, I think it is--more commonplace than people know, in temperaments as unvital and as logical as mine.”
“My reason isn’t often blurred by my instincts.”
“That is because you are strong--terribly strong. It’s not that your vitality is so little as that your thought is so abnormal.”
“No, no; it’s merely that I understand my own experience.”
But she had put his feet upon the road, and, turning his eyes from her as he looked, he contemplated its vista.
It was easy enough, after all, to gather into words that retrospect of the train; it was easy to be brief and lucid with such a comprehending listener,--to be very impersonal, too; simply to hold up before her eyes the picture that he saw.
His eyes met hers seldom while he told her all that was essential to her true seeing. It was wonderful, the sense of her secure, strong life that made it possible to tell her all.
The stages of his young, restless, tortured thought were swiftly sketched for an intelligence so quick, and the growing intuition of the capriciousness, the suffering of life. He only hesitated when it came to the reunion with his mother, the change that had crept between them; and her illness, her death; choosing his words with a reticence that bit them the more deeply into the listening mind.
But, in the days that followed the death,--days ghost-like, yet sharp,--he lingered, so that she paused with him in that pause of stillness in his life, that morning in the spring woods when everything had softly, gently shown an abiding strangeness. He told her all about that: about the look of the day, not knowing why he so wanted her to see it, too, but it seemed to explain more than anything else--the pale, high sky, the gray branches, the shining water and the little bird that hopped to drink. He himself looked ghost-like while he spoke--sunken, long, dark, impalpable, in the deep chair, his thin white fingers lightly interlocked, his face showing only the oddity of its strange yet beautiful oval and its shadowy eyes and lips. All whiteness and shadow, he might have been a projection from the thought of the woman, who, before him, leaned her head on her hand, warm, breathing, vivid with color, her steady eyes seeing phantoms unafraid.