Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/304

 impression, made precisely more aware of itself by repentance for the levity with which you had originally yielded to my contagion."

She didn't insist on her repentance; she was too taken up with the facts themselves. "Oh, but add to my impression everyone else's impression! Has anyone noticed anything?"

"Ah, I don't know what anyone has noticed. I haven't," I brooded, "ventured—as you know—to ask anyone."

"Well, if you had you'd have seen—seen, I mean, all they don't see. If they had been conscious they'd have talked."

I thought. "To me?"

"Well, I'm not sure to you; people have such a notion of what you embroider on things that they're rather afraid to commit themselves or to lead you on: they're sometimes in, you know," she luminously reminded me, "for more than they bargain for, than they quite know what to do with, or than they care to have on their hands."

I tried to do justice to this account of myself. "You mean I see so much?"

It was a delicate matter, but she risked it. "Don't you sometimes see horrors?"

I wondered. "Well, names are a convenience. People catch me in the act?"

"They certainly think you critical."

"And is criticism the vision of horrors?" 298