Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/247

 You see. . . once. . . once. . . ." He broke off sharply, as if what he had been about to say was unbearable.

With Olivia the sense of uneasiness changed into actual terror. She wanted to cry out, "Stop! . . . Don't go on!" But some instinct told her that he meant to go on and on to the very end, painfully, despite anything she could do.

"It's odd," he was saying quite calmly, "but there seem to be only women left . . . no men . . . for Anson is really an old woman."

Quietly, firmly, with the air of a man before a confessor, speaking almost as if she were invisible, impersonal, a creature who was a kind of machine, he went on, "And of course, Horace Pentland is dead, so we needn't think of him any longer. . . . But there's Mrs. Soames. . . ." He coughed and began again to weave the gaunt bony fingers in and out, as if what he had to say were drawn from the depth of his soul with a great agony. "There's Mrs. Soames," he repeated. "I know that you understand about her, Olivia . . . and I'm grateful to you for having been kind and human where none of the others would have been. I fancy we've given Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue subject for conversation for thirty years . . . but I don't care about that. They've watched us . . . they've known every time I went up the steps of her brownstone house . . . the very hour I arrived and the hour I left. They have eyes, in our world, Olivia, even in the backs of their heads. You must remember that, my dear. They watch you . . . they see everything you do. They almost know what you think . . . and when they don't know, they make it up. That's one of the signs of a sick, decaying world . . . that they get their living vicariously . . . by watching some one else live . . . that they live always in the past. That's the only reason I ever felt sorry for Horace Pentland . .. the only reason that I