Mrs. Gracedew looked as if no woman could be shaken who was so prepared to be just all round. "If there be aches--there may be--you're here to soothe them, and if there be draughts--there _must_ be!--you're here to stop them up. And do you know what _I'm_ here for? If I've come so far and so straight, I've almost wondered myself. I've felt with a kind of passion--but now I see _why_ I've felt." She moved about the hall with the excitement of this perception, and, separated from him at last by a distance across which he followed her discovery with a visible suspense, she brought out the news. "I'm here for an act of salvation--I'm here to avert a sacrifice!"
So they stood a little, with more, for the minute, passing between them than either really could say. She might have flung down a glove that he decided on the whole, passing his hand over his head as the seat of some confusion, not to pick up. Again, but flushed as well as smiling, he sought the easiest cover. "You're here, I think, madam, to be a memory for all my future!"
Well, she was willing, she showed as she came nearer, to take it, at the worst, for that. "You'll be one for mine, if I can see you by that hearth. Why do you make such a fuss about changing your politics? If you'd come to Missoura Top, you'd change them quick enough!" Then, as she saw further and struck harder, her eyes grew deep, her face even seemed to pale, and she paused, splendid and serious, with the force of her plea. "What do politics amount to, compared with religions? Parties and programmes come and go, but a duty like this abides. There's nothing you can break with"--she pressed him closer, ringing out--"that would be like breaking _here_. The very words are violent and ugly--as much a sacrilege as if you had been trusted with the key of the temple. This _is_ the temple--don't profane it! Keep up the old altar kindly--you can't set up a new one as good. You _must_ have beauty in your life, don't you see?--that's the only way to make sure of it for the lives of others. Keep leaving it to _them_, to all the poor others," she went on with her bright irony, "and heaven only knows what will become of it! Does it take one of _us_ to feel that?--to preach you the truth? Then it's good, Captain Yule, we come right over--just to see, you know, what you may happen to be about. We know," she went on while her sense of proportion seemed to play into her sense of humour, "what we haven't got, worse luck; so that if you've happily got it you've got it also for _us_. You've got it in trust, you see, and oh! we have an eye on you. You've had it so for me, all these dear days that I've been drinking it in, that, to be grateful, I've wanted regularly to _do_ something." With which, as if in the rich confidence of having convinced him, she came so near as almost to touch him. "Tell me now I shall have done it--I shall have kept you at your post!"