The whole tone of the conversation was so much more frank than anything to which Wynne was accustomed that he felt bewildered. This freedom of criticism of the powers, this want of reverence for conventionalities, gave him a strange feeling of lawlessness. He felt as if he had himself been wonderfully and almost culpably daring in listening. He wondered that he was not more shocked, being sure that it was his duty to be. There was about the young man's mental condition a sort of infantile unsophistication. The New England mind often seems to inherit from bygone Puritanism a certain repellent quality through which it takes long for anything savoring of worldliness or worldly wisdom to penetrate. When once this covering is broken, it may be added, the result is much the same as in the case of the cracking of other glazes.
After he had parted from Miss Morison, Maurice walked on in a blissful state of conscious sinfulness. He understood himself well enough to know that before him lay repentance, but this did not dampen his present enjoyment. He had not so far outgrown his New England conscience as to escape remorse for sin, but he had become so accustomed to the belief that absolution removed guilt that there was in his cup of self-reproach little abiding bitterness.
That afternoon he accompanied Mrs. Staggchase to the house of Mrs. Rangely with a confused feeling as if he were some one else. His cousin wore the same delicately satirical air which marked all her intercourse with him. She carried her head with her accustomed good-humored haughtiness, and her straight lips were curled into the ghost of a smile.
"This is the most stupid humbug of them all," she remarked, as they neared Mrs. Rangely's house on Marlborough Street. "You'll think the deception too transparent to be even amusing,--if you don't become a convert, that is."
"A convert to spiritualism?" Wynne returned with youthful indignation. "I'm not likely to fall so low as that. That is one of the things which are too ridiculous."
She laughed, with that air of superiority which always nettled him a little.
"Don't allow yourself to be one of those narrow persons to whom a thing is always ridiculous if they don't happen to believe it. You believe in so many impossible things yourself that you can't afford to take on airs."
