"Oh, forget it, think about something else, don't mention the subject any more," said Daniel, in a rough, rude voice. But the glance she fixed on him was so stern and unpitying, so testing and so un-girl-like, so strong and so bold, that he felt his heart grow softer. "Let us take a little walk," he said.
For a long time they paced back and forth in perfect silence. Then she asked him what he was working on now. He made cautious, non-committal replies, and then suddenly he was overwhelmed with a flood of words. He remarked that he felt at times as if he were struggling with goblins in the dark. What gushed forth from the deepest depths of his soul, he said, was somehow or other too noisy and blatant, and died in his hands while he was trying to create an appropriate form for it. He said he had no success with anything unless it was something disembodied, incorporeal, the melody of which had thus far found an echo in no human breast. Therefore he seemed to be groping around, without anchorage, after sprites from the land of nowhere. And the more domineering the order was to which he subjected his mind and his fancy, the more lost and hopeless his earthly self seemed to be as it drifted in the chaos of the everyday world. He remarked that heaven was in his dreams, hell in his association with men. And how dead everything about him seemed to be! It was all like a cemetery; it was a cemetery. His doughtiest life was gradually transformed into a shadow and lacerated into a monstrosity. But that he was aggrieved at men he felt full well; for they lived more innocent lives than he, and they were more useful.
"But you have some one to hold to," said Eleanore, realising that she was skating on thin ice, "you have Gertrude."
To this he made no reply. She waited for him to say something, and when she saw that he did not care to make a reply of any kind, she smiled at him as if in a last attempt to get him to tell her what was the matter. Then all peace of mind vanished from her soul--and her face. Every time they passed a street lamp she turned her head to one side.
"She is after all in the presence of God your wife," said Eleanore gently and with remarkable solemnity.
Daniel looked up and listened as if greatly abashed. Speaking out into the wind he said: "The over-tone, Eleanore; a bird twittering in the bush. In the presence of God my wife! But in the roots the bass is howling; it is an infernal tremolo; do you hear it?"