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Well, she was willing to take it. “You’ll be one for mine, if I can see you by that hearth. Why do you make such a fuss about changing your politics? If you’d come to Missoura Top, you’d change them quick enough!” Her eyes grew deep, her face seemed to pale, and she paused, splendid and serious. “What do politics amount to, compared with religions? Parties and programmes come and go, but a duty like this abides. There’s nothing you can break with that would be like breaking here. The very words are violent and ugly—as much a sacrilege as if you had been trusted with the key of the temple. This is the temple—don’t profane it! Keep up the old altar kindly—you can’t set up a new one as good. You must have beauty in your life, don’t you see?—that’s the only way to make sure of it for the lives of others. Keep leaving it to them, to all the poor others, and heaven only knows what will become of it! Does it take one of us to feel that?—to preach you the truth? Then it’s good, Captain Yule, we come right over—just to see, you know, what you may happen to be about. You know what we haven’t got, worse luck; so that if you’ve happily got it you’ve got it also for us. You’ve got it in trust, you see, and oh! we have an eye on you. Tell me now I shall have done it—I shall have kept you at your post!”
If he moved further, it was with the oddest air of seeking rather to study her remarks at his ease than to express an independence of them. He kept his face averted—he was so completely now in intelligent possession of her own. The sacrifice in question carried him even to the door of the court, where he once more stood so long that the persistent presentation of his back might at last have suggested either a confession or a request.
Mrs. Gracedew, a little spent with her sincerity, seated herself again in the great chair. The possibility that he yielded left her as vague in respect to a next step as the possibility that he merely wished to get rid of her. When he finally turned round his expression was an equal check to any power to feel she might have won. “You have,” he queerly smiled at her, “a standpoint quite your own and a style of eloquence that the few scraps of parliamentary training I’ve picked up don’t seem at all to fit me to deal with. Of course I don’t pretend, you know, that I don’t care for Covering.”
She was glad to hear it, if only perhaps for the almost comically ingenuous tone. “You haven’t even seen it yet. Aren’t you a bit afraid?”
He took a minute to reply, then replied—as if to make it up—with a grand collapse. “Yes; awfully. But if I am, it isn’t only Covering that makes me.”
“What else is it?”
“Everything. But it doesn’t in the least matter. You may be quite correct. When we talk of the house your voice comes to me somehow as the wind in its old chimneys.”
Her amusement distinctly revived. “I hope you don’t mean I roar!”
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