Belief and doubt -- Fiction; Clergy -- Fiction; Methodists -- Fiction; New York (State) -- Fiction; Psychological fiction
Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away. She sat with her
head against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced
him.
“I dare say we forced the pace a little,” she remarked, after a pause,
looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement
playing in the corners of her mouth. “It doesn't do for a man to get to
be a Greek all of a sudden. He must work along up to it gradually.”
He remembered the music. “Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,” he
murmured ecstatically, “what a revelation your playing has been to me!
I had never imagined anything like it. I shall think of it to my dying
day.”
He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air when the
music ended. The details of what he had felt and said rose vaguely in
his mind. Pondering them, his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure
to the broad, open doorway beyond. The curtains behind which she had
disappeared were again parted and fastened back. A dim light was burning
within, out of sight, and its faint illumination disclosed a room filled
with white marbles, white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which
shaped themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings of an
extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed. He looked away again.
“I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek idea of
yours,” he said with the abruptness of confusion.
Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone of her answer. “Oh,”
she said almost indifferently, “lots of things. Absolute freedom from
moral bugbears, for one thing. The recognition that beauty is the only
thing in life that is worth while. The courage to kick out of one's life
everything that isn't worth while; and so on.”
“But,” said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power of the bared
arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she had lifted to her
face, “I am going to get you to teach it ALL to me.” The memories began
crowding in upon him now, and the baffling note upon which the mazurka
had stopped short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears. “I want to be
a Greek myself, if you're one. I want to get as close to you--to your
ideal, that is, as I can. You open up to me a whole world that I had not
even dreamed existed. We swore our friendship long ago, you know: and
now, after tonight--you and the music have decided me. I am going to put
the things out of MY life that are not worthwhile. Only you must help
me; you must tell me how to begin.”
He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender entreaty of his
words. The spectacle of a yawn, only fractionally concealed behind those
talented fingers, chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his
face. He rose on the instant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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