She Buildeth Her House Part 8

'Here it is,' he seems to say at the end. 'Take it or leave it. I'm rotting here ash.o.r.e.'"

"You ought to dictate reviews like that, Mr. Reifferscheid," Paula could not help saying, though she knew he would be disconcerted.

He colored, turned back to his work, directing her to take her choice from the shelf of fresh books.... On the car going back, Paula opened Charter's letter. Her fingers trembled, because she had been in a happy and daring mood five or six days before when she wrote the letter to which this was the reply.

... Do you know, I really like to write to you? I feel untrammelled--turned loose in the meadows. It seems when I start an idea--that you've grasped it as soon as it is clear to me. Piled sentences after that are unnecessary. It's a real joy to write this way, as spirits commune. It wouldn't do at all for the blessed mult.i.tude. You have to be a mineral and a vegetable and an animal, all in a paragraph, to get the whole market. But how generous the dear old mult.i.tude is--(if the writer has suffered enough)--with its bed and board and lamplight....

I have been scored and salted so many times that I heal like an earth-worm. Tell me, can scar-tissue ever be so fine?

Fineness--that's the one excellent feature of being human!

There's no other reason for being--no other meaning or reason for atomic affinity or star-hung s.p.a.ce. True, the great Conceiver of Refining Thought seems pleased to take all eternity to play in....

You've made me think of you out of all proportion. I don't want to help it. I'm very glad we hailed each other across the distance. There's something so entirely blithe and wise and finished about the personality I've builded from three little letters and a critique--that I refresh myself very frequently from them.... I think we must be old playmates. Perhaps we plotted ghost-stories and pegged oranges at each other in Atlantean orchards millenniums ago. I begin to feel as if I deserve to have my playmate back.... Then, again, it is as though these little letters brought to my garret window the Skylark I have heard far and faintly so long in the higher moments of dream. Just a note here and there used to come to me from far-s.h.i.+ning archipelagoes of cloud-land. I listen now and clearly understand what you have sung so long in the Heights.... You are winged--that's the word! Wing often to my window--won't you? Life is peppering me with good things this year, I could not be more grateful.

Letters like these made Paula think of that memorable first afternoon with Grimm; and like it, too, the joy was so intense as to hold the suggestion that there must be something evil in it all. She laughed at this. What law, human or divine, was disordered by two human grown-ups with clean minds communing together intimately in letters? Quentin Charter might have been less imperious, or less precipitous, in writing such pleasing matters about herself, but had he not earned the boon of saying what he felt? Still, Paula would not have been so entirely feminine, had she not repressed somewhat. She even may have known that artful repression from without is stimulus to any man. Occasionally, Charter forgot his sense of humor, but the woman five years younger, never. The inevitable thought that in the ordinary sequence of events, they should meet face to face, harrowed somewhat with the thought that she must keep his ideals down--or both were lost. What could a mind like his _not_ build about months of communion (eyes and ears strained toward flas.h.i.+ng skies) with a Skylark ideal?... She reminded Charter that skylarks are little, brown, tame-plumaged creatures that only sing when they soar. She could not forbear to note that he was a bit sky-larky, too, in his letters, and observed that she had found it wise, mainly to keep one's wings tightly folded in New York. She signed her next letter, nevertheless, with a small pen-picture of the name he had given her--full-throated and ascending. Also she put on her house address.

Some of the paragraphs from letters which came in the following weeks, she remembered without referring to the treasured file:

... Bless the wings! May they never tire for long--since I cannot be there when they are folded.... Often, explain it if you can, I think of you as some one I have seen in j.a.pan, especially in Tokyo--hurrying through the dusk in the Minimasakurna-cho, wandering through the tombs of the Forty-seven Ronins. or sipping tea in the Kameido among the wistaria blooms. Some time--who knows? I have made quite a delightful romance about it.... Who is so wise as positively to say, that we are not marvellously related from the youth of the world? Who dares declare we have not climbed cliffs of Cathay to stare across the sky-blue water, nor whispered together in orient cas.e.m.e.nts under constellations that swing more perilously near than these?... We may be a pair of foolish dreamers, but Asia must have a cup of tea for us--Asia, because she is so far and so still. We shall _remember_ then....

And so you live alone? How strange, I have always thought of you so? From the number, I think you must overlook the Park--don't you?... It may strike you humorously, but I feel like ordering you not to take too many meals alone. One is apt to be neglectful, and women lose their appet.i.tes easier than men. I used to be graceless toward the gift of health. Perhaps I enjoy perfectly prepared food altogether too well for one of inner aspirations. The bit of a soul in which you see such glorious possibilities, packs rather an imperious animal this trip, I fear. However, I don't let the animal carry _me_--any more.

I see a wonderful sensitiveness in all that you write--that's why I suggest especially that you should never forget fine food and plentiful exercise. Psychic activity in America is attained so often at the price of physical deterioration. This is an empty failure, uncentering, deluding. Remember, I say in America.... Pray, don't think I fail to wors.h.i.+p sensitiveness--those high, strange emotions, the sense of oneness with all things that live, the vergings of the mind toward the intangible, the light, refres.h.i.+ng sleep of asceticism, subtle expandings of solitude and the mystical launchings,--anything that gives spread of wing rather than amplitude of girth--but I have seen these very pursuits carry one entirely out of rhythm with the world. The mult.i.tudes cannot follow us when there are stars in our eyes--they cannot see.

A few years ago I had a strange period of deep-delving into ancient wisdom. A lot of big, simple treasures unfolded, but I discovered great dogmas as well--the steel s.h.i.+rts, iron s.h.i.+elds, mailed fists and other junk which lesser men seem predestined to hammer about the gentle spirit of Truth. I vegetarianed, lived inside, practiced meditate, and became a sensitive, as it seems now, in rather a paltry, arrogant sense.

The point is I lost the little appeal I had to people through writing. It came to me at length with grim finality that if a man means to whip the world into line at all, he must keep a certain brute strength. He must challenge the world at its own games _and win_, before he can show the world that there are finer games to play. You can't stand above the mists and call the crowd to you, but many will _follow_ you up through them.... I truly hope, if I am wrong in this, that you will see it instantly, and not permit the edge and temper of your fineness to be coa.r.s.ened through me. You are so animate, so delicately strong, and seem so spiritually unhurt, that it occurs to me now that there may be finer laws for you, than are vouchsafed to me. I interpreted my orders--to win according to certain unalterable rules of the world. Balzac did that. I think some Skylark sang to him at the last, when he did his Seraphita....

I cannot help but tell you again of my grat.i.tude. I am no impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to me.... Isn't this an excellent world when the finer moments come; when we can think with gentleness of past failures of the flesh and spirit, and with joy upon the achievements of others; when we feel that we have preserved a certain relish for the rich of all thought, and a pleasure in innocence; when out of our errors and calamities we have won a philosophy which makes serene our present voyaging and gives us keen eyes to discern the coast-lights of the future?... With lifted brow--I harken for your singing.

Paula knew that Quentin Charter was crying out for his mate of fire. She remembered that she had strangely felt his strength before there were any letters, but she could not deny that it since had become a greater and more intimate thing--her tower, white and heroic, cutting clean through the films of distance, and suggesting a vast, invisible city at its base. That she was the bright answer in the East for such a tower was incredible. She could send a song over on the wings of the morning--make it s.h.i.+ne like ivory into the eyes of the new day, but she dared not think of herself as a corresponding fixture. A man like Charter could form a higher woman out of dreams and letter-pages than the world could mold for him from her finest clays. Always she said this--and forgot that the man was clay. A pair of dreamers, truly, and yet there was a difference in their ideals. If Charter's vision of her lifted higher, it was also flexible to contain a human woman. As for hers--Paula had builded a tower. True, there were moments of flying fog in which she did not see it, but clean winds quickly brushed away the obscurations, and not a remnant clung. When seen at all, her tower was pure white and undiminished.

Of necessity there were reactions. His familiarity with the petty intensities of the average man often startled her. He seemed capable of dropping into the parlance of any company, not as one who had listened and memorized, but as an old familiar who had served time in all societies. In the new aspect of personal letters, his book revealed a comprehension of women--that dismayed. Of course, his printed work was filled with such stuff as her letters were made of, but between a book and a letter, there is the same difference of appeal as the lines read by an actor, however gifted, are cold compared to a friend's voice.

Though she wondered at Charter giving his time to write such letters to her, this became very clear, if his inclination were anything like her own to answer them. All the thinking of her days formed itself into compressed messages for him; and all the best of her sprang to her pen under his address. The effort then became to repress, to keep her pages within bounds, and the ultimate effort was to wait several days before writing again. His every sentence suggested pleasure in writing; and as a matter of fact, he repressed very little.... Was it through letters like hers in his leisure months that Charter ama.s.sed his tremendous array of poignant details; was it through such, that he reared his imposing ranges of feminine understanding? This was a question requiring a worldlier woman than Paula long to hold in mind. In the man's writing, regarded from her critical training, there was no betrayal of the literary clerk dependent upon data.

"I am no impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to me." There was something of seers.h.i.+p in his thus irrevocably affixing his ideal to the human woman who held the pen.... His photograph was frequently enough in the press--a big browed, plain-faced young man with a jaw less aggressive than she would have imagined, and a mouth rather finely arched for a reformer who was to whip the world into line. And then there was a discovery. In a magazine dated a decade before, she ran upon his picture among the advertising pages. Verses of his were announced to appear during the year to come. He could not have been over twenty for this picture, and to her it was completely charming--a boy out of the past calling blithely; a poetic face, too, reminding her of prints she had seen of an early drawing of Keats's head now in London--eager, sensitive, all untried!... It was not without resistance that she acknowledged herself _closer to the boy_--that something of the man was beyond her. There was a mystery left upon the face by the intervening years, "while the tireless soul etched on...." Should she ever know? Or must there always be this dim, hurting thing? Was it all the etching of the _soul_--that this later print revealed?... These were but bits of shadow--ungrippable things which made her wings falter for a moment and long for something sure to rest upon, but Reifferscheid's first talk about Charter, the latter's book, and the letters--out of these were reconstructed her tower of s.h.i.+ning purity.

There were times when Paula's heart, gathering all its tributary sympathies, poured out to the big figure in the West in a deep and rus.h.i.+ng torrent. Her entire life was illuminated by these moments of ardor. Here was a giving, in which the thought of actual possession had little or no part. Her finest elements were merged into one-pointed expression. It is not strange that she was dismayed by the triumphant force of the woman within her, nor that she recalled one of the first of Madame Nestor's utterances, "Nonsense, Paula, the everlasting feminine is alive in every movement of you." Yet this outpouring was lofty, and noon-sky clear. An emotion like this meant brightness to every life that contacted it.... But ruthlessly she covered, hid away even from her own thoughts, illuminations such as these. Here was a point of tragic significance. Out of the past has come this great fear to strong women--the fear to let themselves love. This is one of the sorriest evolutions of the self-protecting instinct. So long have women met the tragic fact of fickleness and evasion in the men of their majestic concentrations--that fear puts its weight against the doors that love would open wide.

Almost unconsciously the personal tension of the correspondence increased. Not infrequently after her letters were gone, Paula became afraid that this new, full-powered self of hers had crept into her written pages with betraying effulgence, rising high above the light laughter of the lines. How she cried out for open honesty in the world and rebelled against the garments of falsity which society insists must cover the high as well as the low. Charter seemed to say what was in his heart; at least, he dared to write as the woman could not, as she dared not even to think, lest he prove--against the exclaiming negatives of her soul--a literary craftsman of such furious zeal that he could tear the heart out of a woman he had not seen, pin the quivering thing under his lens, to describe, with his own responsive sensations.

So the weeks were truly emotional. Swiftly, beyond any realization of her own, Paula Linster became full-length a woman. Reifferscheid found it harder and harder to talk even bossily to her, but cleared his voice when she entered, vented a few booky generalities, and cleared his voice when she went away. Keen winter fell upon his system of emptied lakes; gusty winter harped the sound of a lonely s.h.i.+p in polar seas among the naked branches of the big elms above his cottage; indeed, gray winter would have roughed it--in the big chap's breast, had he not buckled his heart against it.... For years, Tim Reifferscheid had felt himself aloof from all such sentiment. Weakening, he had scrutinized his new a.s.sistant keenly for the frailties with which her s.e.x was identified in his mind.

In all their talks together, she had verified not one, so that he was forced to destroy the whole worthless edition. She was a discovery, thrillingly so, since he had long believed such a woman impossible. Now he felt crude beside her, remembered everything that he had done amiss (volumes of material supposed to be out of print). Frankly, he was irritated with any one in the office who presumed to feel himself an equal with Miss Linster.... But all this was Reifferscheid's, and no other--as far from any expression of his, as thoughtless kisses or thundering heroics.

NINTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS DRAWN DEEPER INTO THE SELMA CROSS PAST AND IS BRAVELY WOOED THROUGH FURTHER MESSAGES FROM THE WEST

Selma Cross frequently filled the little place of books across the hall with her tremendous vibrations before the trial trip of her new play on the road. Paula liked to have her come in, delighted in the great creature's rapture over the hunch-back, Stephen Cabot, author of _The Thing_. There was an indescribably brighter l.u.s.ter in the waxing and waning of romantic tides, than the eyes of Paula had ever before discovered, so that the confidences of the other were of moment. Selma was terrified by some promise she had made years before in Kentucky. It was gradually driven deep into the listener's understanding that no matter how harsh and dreadful the intervening years had been, here was a woman to whom a promise meant a promise. Paula was moved almost to tears by the other's description of Stephen Cabot, and the first time she saw him.

"I wonder if the long white face with the pain-lit eyes could ever mean to any one else what it does to me?" Selma whispered raptly when they talked together one Sunday night. "Why, to see him sitting there before me at rehearsal--the finest, lowest head in all the chairs--steadies, exalts me! I hold fast to repression.... It It was Vhruebert who brought me to him, and the first words Stephen said were: 'Your manager is a wizard, Miss Cross, to get you for this. Why, you are the woman I wrote about in _The Thing_!'"

"Tell me more," Paula had whispered.

"We met in Vhruebert's office and forgot the manager entirely. I guess two hours pa.s.sed, as we talked, and went over the play together that first time. Vhruebert sent in his office-boy finally to remind us that he was still in the building. How we three laughed about it!... Then as we started out for luncheon together, Stephen and I, Vhruebert took his place at the door before us, and delivered himself of something like this:

"'You two listen to the father of what you are to be,'" Selma Cross went on, roughening her voice and tightening her nasal pa.s.sages, to imitate the old Hebrew star-maker. "'Listen to the soulless Vhruebert, who brudalizes the great Amerigan stage. You two are Art. Very well, listen to Commerce. It took me twenty-five years to learn that there must be humor in a blay. This _T'ing_ would not lift the lip of a ganary-bird.

It took me twenty-five years to learn there must be joy at the end of a blay--and wedding-bells. This _T'ing_ ends just about--over the hills to the mad-house. Twenty-five years proved to me what I know the first day--that women of the stage must be beautiful. Miss Gross is not. I say no more. Here I have neither dramatist nor star. I could give the blay by Gabot to Ellen Terry--or to Miss Gross, if Ibsen write it. As it is, I have no name. There are five thousand people in this country writing blays with humor and habby endings. There are ten thousand beautiful women exbiring to spend it on the stage. Yet you two are the chosen of Vhruebert. When you look into each other's eye and visper how von-der-ful you are, with rising inflection; and say, "To h.e.l.l with Gommerce and the Binhead Bublic!" remember Vhruebert who advances the money!'"

"And did you remember Vhruebert in that fairy luncheon together?" Paula asked happily.

"No, I only saw the long white face of Stephen Cabot. I wanted to take him in my arms and make him whole!"

For ten weeks Bellingham lay in one of the New York hospitals. "A woman attends him," Madame Nestor informed. "She is young and has been very beautiful. How well do I know her look of impotence and apathy--that look of unresisting obedience." To Paula, the magician seemed back among the dead ages, although Madame Nestor did not regard the present lull without foreboding. Paula could not feel that her real self had been defiled. The dreadful visitations were all but erased, as pa.s.s the spectres of delirium. What was more real, and rocked the centres of her being, was the conception of this outcast's battle for life. She could not forget that it was in pursuing her, that he had been injured. Facing not only death, but extinction, this idolater of life had, as one physician expressed it, held together his shattered vitality by sheer force of will, until healing set in. The only thought comparable in terror to such a conflict, had to do with the solitudes and abject frigidity of inter-stellar s.p.a.ces.

The Skylark Letters, as she came to call them, were after all, the eminent feature of the fall and winter weeks. There was a startling paragraph in one of the December series: "I think it is fitting for you to know (though, believe me, I needed no word regarding you from without), that I am not entirely in the dark as to how you have impressed another. I know nothing of the color of your hair or eyes, nothing of your size or appearance,--only just how you _impressed another_. This information, it is needless to say, was unsolicited...."

Just that, and no further reference. It was as though he had felt it a duty to incorporate those lines. Portions of some of the later letters follow:

Did you know, that without the upward spread of wings--there can be no song from the Skylark? This, for me, has a fragrant and delicate significance. It is true that the poor little caged-birds sing, but how sorry they are, since they have to flutter their wings to give forth sound, and cling with their claws to the bars to hold themselves down!... I think you must have been a little wing-weary when you wrote your last letter to me. Perhaps the dusk was crowding into the Heights. No one knows as I do how the Skylark has sung and sung!... You did not say it, but I think you wanted the earth-sweet meadows. It came to me like needed rain--straight to the heart of mine that little plaint in the song. It made me feel how useless is the strength of my arms.... You see, I manage pretty well to keep you up There. I must. And because you are so wonderful, I can.... An enthralling temperament rises to me from your letters. I love to let it flood through my brain....

I do not feel at all sure that you know me truly. What a man's soul appears to be, through the intimations of his higher moments, is not the man altogether that humans must reckon with. Nor must they reckon with the trampling violences of one's past. I truly believe in the soul. I believe it is an essence fundamentally fine; that great mothers brood it beautifully into their babes; that it is nourished by the good a man does and thinks. I believe in the ultimate victory of the soul, against the tough, twisted fibres of flesh which rise to demand a thousand sensations. I would have you think of me as one _lifting_; happy in discoveries, the crown of which you are; conscious of an integrating spirit; that sometimes in my silences I answer your song as one glorified. But then, I remember that you must not judge me by the brightest of my work. Such are the trained, tense bursts of speed--the swift expiration of the best. I think a man is about half as good as his best work and half as bad as his most lamentable leisure.

Midway between his emotions and exaltations--is indicated his valuation.... All men clinging to the sweep of the upward cycle, must know the evil mult.i.tude at some time. Perhaps few men have met and discarded so many personal devils as I, in a single life. But I say to you as I write to-night, those devils cast out seem far back among cannibal centuries. I wors.h.i.+p the fine, the pure,--thoughts and deeds which are expanded and warmed by the soul's breath. And you are the anchorage of this sweeter spirit which is upon me. Now, out of the logic which life burns into the brain, comes this thought: (I set it down only to fortify the citadel of truth in which our momentous relation alone can prosper.) Are there fangs and hackles and claws which I have not yet uncovered? Am I given the present serenity as a resting-time before meeting a more subtle and formidable enemy? Has my vitality miraculously been preserved for some final battle with a champion of champions of the flesh? Is it because the sting is gone from my scar-tissues that I feel so strong and so white to-night? I cannot think this, because I have heard--because I still hear--my Skylark sing.

The personal element of the foregoing and the hint of years of "wrath and wanderings," which she saw in his second photograph, correlated themselves in Paula's mind. They frightened her cruelly, but did not put Charter farther away. Remembering the effect of the pa.s.sion which Bellingham had projected into her own brain, helped her vaguely to understand Charter's earlier years. His splendid emanc.i.p.ation from past evils lifted her soul. And when he asked, if his present serenity might not be a preparation for a mightier struggle, the serious reflection came--might she not ask the same question of herself? The old Flesh-Mother does not permit one to rest when one is full of strength.... Paula perceived that Quentin Charter was bravely trying to get to some sort of rational adjustment her ideal of him and the blooded reality--and to preserve her from all hurt. Doubts could not exist in a mind besieged by such letters.... One of her communications must have reflected something of her terror at the vague forms of his past, which he partially unveiled, for in answer he wrote:

Do not worry again about the Big Back Time. Perhaps I was over a.s.sertive about the shadowed years. The main thing is that this is the wonderful present--and you, my white ally of n.o.bler power and purpose. A gale of good things will come to us--hopes, communions and inspirations. We shall know each other--grow so fine together--that Mother Earth at last will lose her down-pull upon us--as upon perfumes and sunbeams. You have come with mystical brightening. You are the New Era. There is healing in Gethsemanes since you have swept with grace and imperiousness into possession of the Charter heart-country so long undiscovered. The big area is lit, redeemed from chaos. It is thrilling--since you are there. Never must you wing away....

Sometime you shall know with what strength and truth and tenderness I regard you. The spirit of spring is in my veins.

It would turn to summer if we were together, but there could be no reacting winter because you have evolved a mind and a soul.... Body and mind and soul all evenly ignited--what a conception of woman!

Paula begged him not to try to fit such an ideal of the finished feminine to a little brown tame-plumaged skylark. Since they might some time meet, she wrote, it was nothing less than unfair for his mind, trained to visualize its images so clearly, to turn its full energies upon an ideal, and expect a human stranger--a happening--in the workaday physical vesture (such as is needed for New York activities) to sublimate the vision. She told him that he would certainly flee away from the reality, and that he would have no one but himself to blame.

Visions, she added, do not review books nor write to authors whom they have not met. All of which, she expressed very lightly, though she could not but adore the spirit of ideality to which she had aroused his faculties.

At this time Paula encountered one of the imperishable little books of the world, bracing to her spirit as a day's camp among mountain-pines.

Nor could she refrain from telling Charter about "The Practice of the Presence of G.o.d," as told in the conversations of Brother Lawrence, a bare-footed Carmelite of the Seventeenth Century. "No wilderness wanderings seem to have intervened between the Red Sea and the Jordan of his experience," she quoted from the preface, and told him how simple it was for this unlearned man to be good--a mere "footman and soldier"

whose illumination was the result of seeing a dry and leafless tree in mid-winter, and the thought of the change that would come to it with the Spring. His whole life thereafter, largely spent in the monastery kitchen--"a great awkward fellow, who broke everything"--was conducted as if G.o.d were his constantly advising Companion. It was a life of supernal happiness--and so simple to comprehend. Charter's reply to this letter proved largely influential in an important decision Paula was destined to make.

Yes, I have communed with Brother Lawrence--carried the little volume with me on many voyages. I commend a mind that is fine enough to draw inspiration from a message so chaste and simple.

You will be interested to hear that I have known another Brother Lawrence--a man whose holiness one might describe as "humble" or "lofty," with equal accuracy. This man is a Catholic priest, Father Fontanel of Martinique. His parish is in that amazing little port, Saint Pierre--where Africa and France were long ago transplanted and have fused together so enticingly. Lafcadio Hearn's country--you will say. I wonder that this inscrutable master, Hearn, missed Father Fontanel in his studies.... I was rough from the seas and a long stretch of military campaigning, when my s.h.i.+p turned into that lovely harbor of Saint Pierre. Finding Father Fontanel, I stayed over several s.h.i.+ps, and the healing of his companions.h.i.+p restores me even now to remember.

We would walk together on the _Morne d'Orange_ in the evening.

His church was on the rise of the _morne_ at the foot of _Rue Victor Hugo_. He loved to hear about my explorations in books, especially about my studies among the religious enthusiasts. I would tell him of the almost incredible austerities of certain mystics to refine the body, and it was really a sensation to hear him exclaim in his French way: "Can it be possible? I am very ignorant. All that I know is to wors.h.i.+p the good G.o.d who is always with me, and to love my dear children who have so much to bear. I do not know why I should be so happy--unless it is because I know so very little. Tell me why I live in a state of continual transport...." I can hear his gentle Latin tones even now at night when I shut my eyes--see the lights of the s.h.i.+pping from that cliff road, hear the creoles' moaning songs from the cabins, and recall the old volcano, _La Montagne Pelee_, outlined like a huge couchant beast against the low, northern stars.

Father Fontanel has meant very much to me. In all my thinking upon the ultimate happiness of the race, he stands out as the bright achievement. At the time I knew him, there was not a single moment of his life in which the physical of the man was supreme. What his earlier years were I do not know, of course, but I confess now I should like to know.... The presence of G.o.d was so real to him, that Father Fontanel did not understand at all his own great spiritual strength. Nor do his people quite appreciate how great he is among the priests of men. He has been in their midst so long that they seem accustomed to his power. Only a stranger can realize what a pure, s.h.i.+ning garment his actual _flesh_ has become. To me there was healing in the very approach of this man.

Dear Father Fontanel! All I had to do was to subst.i.tute "Higher Self" for "G.o.d" and I had my religion--the Practice of the Presence of the Higher Self. Does it not seem very clear to you?... To me, G.o.d is always an abstraction--something of vaster glory than the central sun, but one's Spiritual Body, the real being, integrated through interminable lives, from the finest materials of thought and action--this Higher Self is the Presence I must keep always with me, and do I not deserve that It should stand scornfully aloof, when, against my better knowledge, I fall short in the performance?... I think it is his Higher Self which is so l.u.s.trous in Father Fontanel, and the enveloping purity which comes from you is the same. About such purity there is nothing icy nor fibrous nor sterile....

You are singing in my heart, Skylark.

The picture Charter had drawn of Father Fontanel of Saint Pierre appealed strongly to Paula; and her mind's quick grasp of the Charter religion--the Practice of the Presence of the Higher Self--became one of her moments of illumination. This was ground-down simplicity. True, every idea of Charter's was based upon reincarnation. Indeed, this seemed so familiar to him, that he had not even undertaken to state it as one of his fundamentals. But had she cared, she could have discarded even that, from the present concept. So to live that the form of the best within be not degraded; the days a constant cheris.h.i.+ng of this Invisible Friend; the conduct of life constantly adjusted to please this Companion of purity and wisdom--here was ethics which blew away every cloud impending upon her Heights. Years of such living could not but bring one to the Uplands. As to Charter, G.o.d had always been to her The Ineffable--source of solar, aye, universal energy--the Unseen All.