The mouth of Mrs. Bittacy was heard to close with a snap.  Her shawl, and particularly her crackling dress, exhaled the protest that burned within her like a pain.  She was too distressed to be overawed, but at the same time too confused ’mid the litter of words and meanings half understood, to find immediate phrases she could use.  Whatever the actual meaning of his language might be, however, and whatever subtle dangers lay concealed behind them meanwhile, they certainly wove a kind of gentle spell with the glimmering darkness that held all three delicately enmeshed there by that open window.  The odors of dewy lawn, flowers, trees, and earth formed part of it.

“The moods,” he continued, “that people waken in us are due to their hidden life affecting our own.  Deep calls to sleep.  A person, for instance, joins you in an empty room:  you both instantly change.  The new arrival, though in silence, has caused a change of mood.  May not the moods of Nature touch and stir us in virtue of a similar prerogative?  The sea, the hills, the desert, wake passion, joy, terror, as the case may be; for a few, perhaps,” he glanced significantly at his host so that Mrs. Bittacy again caught the turning of his eyes, “emotions of a curious, flaming splendor that are quite nameless.  Well ... whence come these powers?  Surely from nothing that is ... dead!  Does not the influence of a forest, its sway and strange ascendancy over certain minds, betray a direct manifestation of life?  It lies otherwise beyond all explanation, this mysterious emanation of big woods.  Some natures, of course, deliberately invite it.  The authority of a host of trees,”—­his voice grew almost solemn as he said the words—­“is something not to be denied.  One feels it here, I think, particularly.”

There was considerable tension in the air as he ceased speaking.  Mr. Bittacy had not intended that the talk should go so far.  They had drifted.  He did not wish to see his wife unhappy or afraid, and he was aware—­acutely so—­that her feelings were stirred to a point he did not care about.  Something in her, as he put it, was “working up” towards explosion.

He sought to generalize the conversation, diluting this accumulated emotion by spreading it.

“The sea is His and He made it,” he suggested vaguely, hoping Sanderson would take the hint, “and with the trees it is the same....”

“The whole gigantic vegetable kingdom, yes,” the artist took him up, “all at the service of man, for food, for shelter and for a thousand purposes of his daily life.  Is it not striking what a lot of the globe they cover ... exquisitely organized life, yet stationary, always ready to our had when we want them, never running away?  But the taking them, for all that, not so easy.  One man shrinks from picking flowers, another from cutting down trees.  And, it’s curious that most of the forest tales and legends are dark, mysterious, and somewhat ill-omened.  The forest-beings are rarely gay and harmless.  The forest life was felt as terrible.  Tree-worship still survives to-day.  Wood-cutters... those who take the life of trees... you see a race of haunted men....”