Cecile was alone; the children had gone upstairs to tidy themselves for dinner. She tried to get back her distant vistas, fading into the pale horizon; she tried to recover the silvery endlessness which had shot through her as a vision of light. But instead her brain was all awhirl with a kaleidoscope of very recent petty memories: the children, Quaerts, Emerson, Jules, Suzette, Amélie. How strange, how strange life was!... The outer life; the coming and going of people about us; the sounds of words which they utter in strange accents; the endless interchange of phenomena; the concatenation of those phenomena, one with the other; strange, too, the presence of a soul somewhere inside us, like a god [75]within us, never to be known in our own essence. Often, as indeed now, it seemed to Cecile that all things, even the most commonplace things, were strange, very strange, as if nothing in the world were absolutely commonplace, as if everything were strange: the strange form and outward expression of a deeper life that lies hidden behind everything, even the meanest objects; as if everything displayed itself under an appearance, a mask of pretence, while the reality, the very truth, lay underneath. How strange, how strange life was!... For it seemed to her as if she, under that very usual afternoon tea, had seen something very unusual; she did not know what, she could not express it nor even think it thoroughly; it seemed to her as if beneath the coming and going of those people something had glittered: a reality, an ultimate truth under the appearance of that casual afternoon tea. [76]

“What is it? What is it?” she wondered. “Am I deluding myself, or is it so? I feel that it is so....”

It was all very vague and yet so very clear.... It seemed to her as though there were a vision, a haze of light behind all that had happened there, behind Amélie and Jules and Quaerts and the book which he had picked up from the floor and held in his hand for a moment.... Did that vision, that haze of light mean anything, or....

But she shook her head:

“I am dreaming, I am giving way to fancy,” she laughed, within herself. “It was all very simple; I only make it complex because it amuses me to do so.”

But she had no sooner thought this than she felt something which denied the thought absolutely, an intuition which should have made her guess the essence of the truth, but did not quite succeed. [77]Surely there was something, something behind it all, hiding away, lurking as the shadow lurked behind the thing; and the shadow appeared to her as a vision and haze of light....

Her thoughts still wandered over all those people and finally halted at Taco Quaerts. She saw him sitting there again, bending slightly forward in her direction, his hands folded and hanging between his knees, as he looked up to her. A barrier of aversion had stood between them like an iron bar. She saw him sitting there again, though he was gone. That again was past: how quickly everything moved; how small was the speck of the present!

She rose, sat down at her writing-table and wrote:

“Beneath me flows the sea of the past; above me drifts the ether of the future; and I stand midway upon the one speck of [78]reality, so small that I must press my feet firmly together lest I lose my hold. And from the speck of the present my sorrow looks down upon the sea and my longing up to the sky.

“It is scarcely life to stand upon this speck, so small that I hardly appreciate it, hardly feel it beneath my feet; and yet to me it is the one reality. I am not greatly occupied about it: my eyes only follow the rippling of those waves towards distant horizons, the gliding of those clouds towards distant spheres, vague manifestations of endless change, translucent ephemeras, visible incorporeities. The present is the only thing that is, or rather that seems to be. The speck is, or at least appears to be, but not the sea below nor the sky above, for the sea is but a memory and the air but an illusion. Yet memory and illusion are everything: they are the wide inheritance of the soul, which [79]alone can escape from the speck of the moment to float upon the sea towards the horizons which retreat, to drift upon the clouds towards the spheres which retreat and retreat....”

Then she reflected. How was it that she had written all this and why? How had she come to write it? She went back upon her thoughts: the present, the speck of the present, which was so small.... Quaerts, Quaerts’ very attitude, rising up before her just now. Was he in any way concerned with her writing down those sentences? The past a sorrow; the future an illusion.... Why, why illusion?

“And Jules, who likes him,” she thought. “And Amélie, who spoke of him ... but she knows nothing.... What is there in him, what lurks behind him: his visionary image? Why did he [80]come here? Why do I dislike him so? Do I dislike him? I cannot see into his eyes....”

She would have liked to do this once; she would have liked to make sure that she disliked him or that she did not: one or the other. She was curious to see him once more, to know what she would think and feel about him then....

She had risen from her writing-table and now lay at full length on the sofa, with her arms folded behind her head. She no longer knew what she dreamt, but she felt peacefully happy. She heard Dolf and Christie come down the stairs. They came in, it was dinner-time.

“Jules was really naughty just now, wasn’t he, Mummy?” Christie asked again, with a grave face.

She drew the frail little fellow gently to her, took him tightly in her arms and [81]fondly kissed his moist, pale-raspberry lips:

“No, really not, darling!” she said. “He wasn’t naughty, really....”