She gave a little rippling laugh that only sounded hollow to the image listening in the glass. “You choose strange times in which to be struck,” said she, holding up two dresses for his inspection, with a lift of her brows evidently meant as an inquiry as to which he thought the most becoming.
“Conscience is the chooser, not I,” declared he, for once allowing himself to ignore the weighty question of dress thus propounded.
His wife gave a little toss of her head and he left the room.
“I should like Edward very much,” murmured she in a burst of confidence to her own reflection in the glass, “if only he would not bother himself so much about that same disagreeable conscience.”
“You look unhappy,” said Mr. Sylvester to Paula as they came from the dining-room. “Have the adventures of the day made such an impression upon you that you will not be able to enjoy the evening’s festivities?”
She lifted her face and the quick smile came.
“I do not like to see your brow so clouded,” continued he, smoothing his own to meet her searching eye. “Smiles should sit on the lips of youth, or else why are they so rosy.”
“Would you have me smile in face of my first glimpse of wickedness,” asked she, but in a gentle tone that robbed her words of half their reproach. “You must remember that I have had but little experience with the world. I have lived all my life in a town of wholesome virtues, and while here I have been kept from contact with anything low or base. I have never known vice, and now all in a moment I feel as if I have been bathed in it.”
He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him. “Does your whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula? What will you do in this wicked world? What will you say to the sinner when you meet him—as you must?”
“I don’t know; it’s a problem I have never been brought to consider. I feel as if launched on a dismal sea for which I have neither chart nor compass. Life was so joyous to me this morning—” a flush swept over her cheek but he did not notice it—“I held, or seemed to hold, a cup of white wine in my hand, but suddenly as I looked at it, it turned black and—”
Ah, the outreach, the dismal breaking away of thought into the unfathomable, that lies in the pause of an and!
“And do you refuse to drink a cup across which has fallen a shadow,” murmured Mr. Sylvester, his eyes fixed on her face, “the inevitable shadow of that great mass of human frailty and woe which has been accumulating from the foundation of the world?”
“No, no, I cannot, and retain my humanity. If there is such evil in the world, its pressure must drive it across the path of innocence.”
“And you accept the cup?”
“I must; but oh, my vanished beliefs! This morning the wine of my life was pure and white, now it is black and befouled. What will make it clean again?”
With a sigh Mr. Sylvester dropped her hand and turned towards the mantelpiece. It was April as I have said, and there was no fire in the grate, but he posed his foot on the fender and looked sadly down at the empty hearthstone.
“Paula,” said he after a space of pregnant silence, “it had to come. The veil of the temple must be rent in every life. Evil is too near us all for us to tread long upon the flowers without starting up the adders that hide beneath them. You had to have your first look into the cells of darkness, and perhaps it is best you had it here and now. The deeps are for men’s eyes as well as the starry heavens.”
“Yes, yes.”
“There are some persons,” he went on slowly, “you know them, who tread the ways of life with their eyelids closed to everything but the strip of velvet lawn on which they choose to walk. Earth’s sighs and deep-drawn groans are nothing to them. The world may swing on in its way to perdition; so long as their pathway feels soft, they neither heed nor care. But you do not desire to be one of these, Paula! With your great soul and your strong heart, you would not ask to sit in a flowery maze, while the rest of the world went sliding on and down into wells of destruction, you might have made pools of healing by the touch of your womanly sympathy.”
“No, no.”
“I cannot tell you, I dare not tell you,” he went on in a strange pleading voice that tore at the very roots of her heart, and rung in her memory forever, “what evil underlies the whole strata of life! At home and abroad, on our hearthstones and within our offices, the mocking devil sits. You can scarcely walk a block, my little one, without encountering a man or brushing against the dress of a woman across whose soul the black shadow lies heavier than any words of his or hers could tell. What the man you saw today, said of one unhappy being in this city, is true, God help us all, of many. Dark spots are easier acquired than blotted out, my Paula. In business as in society, one needs to carry the white shield of a noble purpose or a self-forgetting love, to escape the dripping of the deadly upas tree that branches above all humanity. I have walked its ways, my darling, and I know of what I speak. Your white robe is spotless but—”
“O there is where the pain comes in,” she cried; “there, just there, is where the dagger strikes. She says she was once like me. O, could any temptation, any suffering, any wrong or misfortune that might befall me, ever bring me to where she is! If it could—”
“Paula!” This time his voice
