The other threw out her hands with a gesture of wearied impatience, and then clasped them upon her knee. “I seem not to know what I want! What is the good of talking about it? What is the good of anything?”
“Now--now!” Celia's assumption of a monitor's tone had reference, apparently, to something understood between the two, for Lady Cressage deferred to it, and even summoned the ghost of a smile.
“There is really nothing to tell,”--she faltered, hesitatingly--“that is, nothing happened. I don't know how to say it--the talk left my mind in a whirl. I couldn't tell you why. It was no particular thing that was said--it seemed to be more the things that I thought of while something else was being talked about--but the whole experience made a most tremendous impression upon me. I've tried to straighten it out in my own mind, but I can make nothing of it. That is what disturbs me, Celia. No man has ever confused me in this silly fashion before. Nothing could be more idiotic. I'm supposed to hold my own in conversation with people of--well, with people of a certain intellectual rank,--but this man, who is of hardly any intellectual rank at all, and who rambled on without any special aim that one could see--he reduced my brain to a sort of porridge. I said the most extraordinary things to him--babbling rubbish which a school-girl would be ashamed of. How is that to be accounted for? I try to reason it out, but I can't. Can you?”
“Oh, that is meaningless,” the other declared. “Anybody can say 'nerves.' Of course, all human thought and action is 'nerves.'”
“But yours is a special case of nerves,” Celia pursued, with gentle imperturbability. “I think I can make my meaning clear to you--though the parallel isn't precisely an elegant one. The finest thoroughbred dog in the world, if it is beaten viciously and cowed in its youth, will always have a latent taint of nervousness, apprehension, timidity--call it what you like. Well, it seems to me there's something like that in your case, Edith. They hurt you too cruelly, poor girl. I won't say it broke your nerve--but it made a flaw in it. Just as a soldier's old wound aches when there's a storm in the air--so your old hurt distracts and upsets you under certain psychological conditions. It's a rather clumsy explanation, but I think it does explain.”