She went on calmly shaking out Mrs. Gay’s sheets before the radiator, as if the conversation were over, while behind her on the pale green wall, her shadow loomed distinct, grotesque, and sexless.  But Molly was in the mood when the need to talk—­to let oneself go—­is so great that the choice of a listener is little more than an accident.  She had discovered at last—­discovered in that illuminating moment in Applegate—­the meaning of the homesickness, of the restlessness, of the despondency of the last few months.  Before she could understand what Abel had meant to her, she had been obliged to draw away from him, to measure him from a distance, to put the lucid revealing silence between them.  It was like looking at a mountain, when one must fall back to the right angle of view, must gain the proper perspective, before one can judge of the space it fills on the horizon.  What she needed was merely to see Abel in relation to other things in her life, to learn how immeasurably he towered above them.  Her blood rushed through her veins with a burning sweetness, and while she stood there watching Kesiah, the wonder and the intoxication of magic was upon her.  She had passed within the Enchanter’s circle, and her soul was dancing to the music of flutes.

“Aunt Kesiah,” she asked suddenly, and her voice thrilled, “were you ever in love?”

Kesiah looked up from the sheets with the expression of a person who has been interrupted in the serious business of life by the fluttering of a humming-bird.  It required an effort for her to recede from the comfortable habit of thought she had attained to the point of view from which the aspirations of the soul had appeared of more importance than the satisfactions of the body.  Only for a few weeks in the spring did she relapse periodically into such a condition of mind.

“Never,” she answered.

“Did you never feel that you cared about anybody—­in that way?”

“Never.”

It was incredible!  It was appalling!  But it really had happened!  Love, which filled the world, was not the beginning and the end, as it ought to be, of every mortal existence.  Subtract it from the universe and there was nothing left but a void, yet in this void, life seemed to move and feed and have its being just as if it were really alive.  People indeed—­even women—­would go on, like Kesiah, for almost sixty years, and not share, for an instant, the divine impulse of creation.  They could exist quite comfortably on three meals a day without ever suspecting the terrible emptiness that there was inside of them.  They could even wring a stale satisfaction out of this imitation existence—­this play of make-believe being alive.  And around them all the time there was the wonder and the glory of the universe!

Then Kesiah turned suddenly from the radiator, and there was an expression in her face which reminded Molly of the old lady with the bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria she had seen on the train—­an expression of useless knowledge and regret, as though she realized that she had missed the essential thing and that it was life, after all, that had been to blame for it.  For a minute only the look lasted, for Kesiah’s was a closed soul, and the smallest revelation of herself was like the agony of travail.