She was empty, desolate, hopeless; craving her former
joy and carelessness, she found only hate and diabolical calculation.
This man, whom she had loved to the point of losing her soul for him,
had bequeathed to her one black and fiery thing--the terror of the
damned. His thinking wrapped her in this iron garment that held her
fast.
All this Frances told me, far more briefly than I have here repeated it.
In her eyes and gestures and laconic sentences lay the conviction of
great beating issues and of menacing drama my own description fails to
recapture. It was all so incongruous and remote from the world I lived
in that more than once a smile, though a smile of pity, fluttered to my
lips; but a glimpse of my face in the mirror showed rather the leer of a
grimace. There was no real laughter anywhere that night.
The entire adventure seemed so incredible, here, in this twentieth
century--but yet delusion, that feeble word, did not occur once in the
comments my mind suggested though did not utter. I remembered that
forbidding Shadow too; my sister's watercolors; the vanished personality
of our hostess; the inexplicable, thundering Noise, and the figure of
Mrs. Marsh in her midnight ritual that was so childish yet so horrible.
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