“Oh, no, he hasn’t been here, but he has been telling David Cairns things about writing....  David has really been born again.”

“Do you know, Beth,” Vina declared with intensity, “he has been such an inspiration to me, that I’m afraid my ‘Stations’ will look like a repaired wall, half new and half old plaster.”

“My work will stand an inspiration, too.”

“Beth——­”

“Yes.”

“You know what I think of your work, but I believe the Sailor-man could give you that inspiration——­”

“Perhaps I can get it through you and David Cairns,” remarked Beth, who was beginning to see, and with no little amazement, that to Vina the inspiration was spiritual, impersonal.  This made Bedient’s influence all the more exciting.

“Oh, he’ll come to you, right enough.  I supposed he had....  You know I was making my James and Matthews, my Peters and Jews and Romans quite contentedly in that bleak way it has been done a thousand times.  But he made me see them!  And the slopes of Calvary, and Gethsemane hunched in the darkness, and the Christ kneeling in a faint starry light; he made me see Him kneeling there, His Spirit, like a great mother’s loving heart, standing between an angry Father and the world, a wilful child——­”

“Yes,” came softly from Beth.

“And it’s almost too much for me now—­the Passion, the Agony, the Crime and the Night—­too much for me and clay.  It would be, if it were not for the glowing Marys.  They’re for us, Beth——­”

“That’s sweet of you, Vina....  It won’t be too much.  You’re in the reaction now.  After that passes you will do the ‘Stations’ as they have never been done.  And God’s poor people will pass before your work for years and years to come; and something, as much as they can bear of the thrilling anguish of this new light of yours, will come to them, as they pray before the Eternal Tragedy.”

“But that isn’t all, Beth!...  There’s another; a terrible side.  I sort of had myself in hand until he came, sort of felt myself two thousand years old, back among them.  But he has made me a pitiful modern again, a woman who has tried and refuses to try longer, to be happy with clay dolls.  And Mary McCullom——­”

“Is submerged in tea—­past resuscitation....  That modern madness will pass, too, dear.  ’Member how those Italian giants used to have periods of madness while they decorated the everlasting cathedrals?  No modern man could come into your studio and break your work for long, Vina.  You know we promised each other that none could.”  Beth shivered at her memory.  Vina had made her forget for a moment.

“But we said in our haste then, that all men were just natives——­”

“Many wise women say so at their leisure——­”

“But Mary McCullom——­”

“Taboo——­”

“Well, then, he made me see there were real men in the world,” Vina declared with slow defiance.