It was this quality in him, of difference from usual things, that drew intimacy so near. To talk to him with a wonderful openness, to tell him about herself, about her troubles, was like sinking down in a pale, peaceful church and sighing out everything that lay heavily on one’s heart--the things that lay lightly, too, for little things as well as great, were understood by that compassionate, musing presence--to the downlooking face of an imaged saint.
No claim upon one remained after it; one was freed of the load of silence and one hadn’t in the least been shackled by retributory penances. And if one felt some strange lack in the saint, if his sacerdotal quality was more than his humanity, it was just because of that that one was able to say anything one liked.
At moments, it is true, she had an odd, fetish-worshiper’s impulse to smash her saint, and perhaps the reason why she never yielded to it was because, under all the seeing him as image, was the deep hoping that he was more. If he was more, much more, it might be unwise to smash him, for then she would have no pale church in which to take refuge, and, above all, if he were more he mustn’t find it out--and she mustn’t--through any act of her own. The saint himself must breathe into life and himself step down from his high pedestal. That he cared to listen, that he listened lovingly,--just as he had listened lovingly to Mrs. MacHendrie,--she knew.
One day when he was again able to be out and when they were again upon the hilltop, walking in a mist that enshrouded them, she told him all about the wretched drama of her love-affair.
She had never spoken of it to a human being.
It was as if she led him into an empty room, dusty and dark and still, with dreary cobwebs stretching over its once festal furniture, and there pointed out to him faded blood-stains on the floor. No eyes but his had ever seen them.
She told him all, analyzing the man, herself, unflinchingly, putting before him her distracted heart, distorted in its distraction. She had appalled herself. Her part had not been mere piteous nobility. She would have dragged herself through any humiliation to have had him back, the man she had helplessly adored. She would have taken him back on almost any terms. Only the semblance of pride had been left to her; beneath it, with all her scorn of him, was a craving that had been base in its despair.