I chose to feign that he meant in the pictures. “Over and over again,” I answered.
He would not have my feint. “I don’t mean in these wretched caricatures!”
“I mean her very self, listening, looking, living--waiting!”
Whether I had insanity or sorrow to deal with, I could not gainsay the unhappy man, and I only said what I really felt: “Yes, the place seems strangely full of her. I wish you would tell me about her.”
He asked, with a certain slyness, “Have you heard anything about her already? At the club? From that fool woman in the kitchen?”
He seemed relieved of whatever suspicion he felt, but he said finally, and with an air of precaution, “I should like to know just how much you mean by the place seeming full of her.”
“Oh, I suppose the association of her personality with the whole house, and especially this room. I didn’t mean anything preternatural, I believe.”
“Then you don’t believe in a life after death?” he demanded with a kind of defiance.
I thought this rather droll, seeing what his own position had been, but that was not the moment for the expression of my amusement. “The tendency is to a greater tolerance of the notion,” I said. “Men like James and Royce, among the psychologists, and Shaler, among the scientists, scarcely leave us at peace in our doubts, any more, much less our denials.”
He said, as if he had forgotten the question: “They called it a very light case, and they thought she was getting well. In fact, she did get well, and then--there was a relapse. They laid it to her eating some fruit which they allowed her.”
Alderling spoke with a kind of bitter patience, but in my own mind I was not able to put all the blame on the doctors. Neither did I blame that innocently earthy creature, who was of no more harm in her strong appetite than any other creature which gluts its craving as simply as it feels it. The sense of her presence was deepened by the fact of those childlike self-indulgences which Alderling’s words recalled to me. I made no comment, however, and he asked gloomily, as if with a return of his suspicion, “And you haven’t heard of anything happening afterward?”
“I don’t know what you refer to,” I told him, “but I can safely say I haven’t, for I haven’t heard anything at all.”