“But tell me, why should this discovery of this other life make you so miserable?”

“Oh, because it brings such a want with it.  How can I explain?  It is like a poor wretch stupefied with drink.  Don’t you know the poor creatures in the Eastend sometimes drink just that they may not feel how hungry and how cold they are?  ‘They remember their misery no more.’  Is the life of the world and of outward things like that, if we live too much in it?  I used to be so contented with it all—­its pleasures, its little triumphs, even its gossip; and what I called my aspirations I satisfied with what was nothing more than phrases.  And now I have found my real self, now I am awake, I want much more, and there is nothing—­only a great silence, a great loneliness like that in the face.  And the theories I talked about are no comfort any more; they are just what pretty speeches would be to a person in torture.  Oh, Mr. Lyndsay, I always feel that you are real, that you are good; tell me what you know.  Is there nothing but this dark void beyond when life falls away from us?”

She lifted towards me a face quivering with excitement, and eyes that waited wild and famished for my answer—­the answer I had not for her, and then indeed I tasted the full bitterness of the cup of unbelief.

“No,” she said presently, “I knew it; no one can do me any good but Cecilia de Noel.”

“And she believes?”

“It is not what she believes, it is what she is.”

She rested her head upon her hand and looked musingly towards the window, down which the drops were trickling, and said—­

“Ever since I have known Cecilia I have always felt that if all the world failed this would be left.  Not that I really imagined the world would fail me, but you know how one imagines things, how one asks oneself questions.  If I was like this, if I was like that, what should I do?  I used to say to myself, if the very worst happened to me, if I was ill of some loathsome disease from which everybody shrank away, or if my mind was unhinged and I was tempted with horrible temptations like I have read about, I would go to Cecilia.  She would not turn from me; she would run to meet me as the father in the parable did, not because I was her friend but because I was in trouble.  All who are in trouble are Cecilia’s friends, and she feels to them just as other people feel towards their own children.  And I could tell her everything, show her everything.  Others feel the same; I have heard them say so—­men as well as women.  I know why—­Cecilia’s pity is so reverent, so pure.  A great London doctor said to me once, ’Remember, nothing is shocking or disgusting to a doctor.’  That is like Cecilia.  No suffering could ever be disgusting or shocking to Cecilia, nor ridiculous, nor grotesque.  The more humiliating it was, the more pitiful it would be to her.  Anything that suffers is sacred to Cecilia.  She would comfort, as if she went on her knees to one; and her touch on one’s wounds, one’s ugliest wounds, would be like,”—­she hesitated and looked about her in quest of a comparison, then, pointing to a picture over the door, a picture of the Magdalene, kissing the bleeding feet upon the Cross, ended, “like that.”