Despite the general warmth of the time, a fire burnt steadily on the hearth.
Gortre sat down at her invitation, and they fell into a desultory conversation. He waited for her to open on the real subjects that had brought him there.
He watched the tired, handsome face. Coarse it certainly was, in expression rather than feature, but that very coarseness gave it power. This woman, who lived the life of a doll, had character. One saw that. Perhaps, he thought, as he looked at her, that the very eagerness and greed for pleasure marked in her face, the passionate determination to tear the heart and core out of life, might still be directed to purer and nobler ends.
Then she began to talk to him quite frankly, and with no disguise or slurring over the facts of her life.
"I'm sick and tired of it all, Mr. Gortre," she said bitterly. "You can't know what it means a bit--lucky for you. Imagine spending all your life in a room painted bright yellow, eating nothing but chocolate creams, with a band playing comic songs for ever and ever. And even then you won't get it."
Basil shuddered. There was something so poignant and forceful in her words that they hurt, stung like a whip-lash. He was being brought into terrible contact not only with sin and the satiety of sin, but with its results. The hideous staleness and torture of it all appalled him as he looked at this human personification of it in the crimson gown.
"That's how it was at first," she continued. "I knew there was something more than this in life, though. I could read it in people's faces. So I came to the service at your church one Sunday evening. I'd never made fun of religion and all that at any time. I simply couldn't believe it, that was all. Then I heard you preach on the Resurrection. I heard all the proofs for the first time. Of course, I could see there wasn't any doubt about the matter at all. Then, curiously, directly I began to _believe_ in it I began to hate the way I was going on, so I went to Father Ripon, who was very nice, and he said you'd call."
"I quite understand you, Miss Hunt," said Gortre. "That's the beauty of faith. When once you believe, then you've _got_ to change. It's a great pity, a very great pity, that clergymen don't attempt to explain things more than they do. If one isn't built in a certain way, I can quite understand and sympathise with any one who isn't able to take a parson's mere statement on trust, so to speak. But that's beside the way. _You_ believe at any rate. And now what are you going to do? I'm here to help you in every possible way. I want to hear your views, just as you have thought them out."