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I appealed to her, and she answered from her calm: "It is very unaccountable." "Then you really mean it! Why can't you give me an illustration?" "Why, you know," said Alderling more seriously than he had yet spoken, "I don't believe those things, if they are real, can ever be got to show off.
Alderling, which I certainly did not experience in Alderling's. Temperamentally he was less fitted to undergo the rigors of their seclusion than she was; in his liking to talk, he needed an audience and a variety of listening, and she, in her somewhat feline calm, could not have been troubled by any such need.
She doesn't believe she is going to live again, either." Mrs. Alderling said, "I don't care for it in my case." That struck me as rather touching, but I had no right to enter uninvited into the intimacy of her meaning, and I said, looking as little at her as I need, "Aren't you both rather belated?" "You mean that protoplasm has gone out?" he chuckled. "Not exactly," I answered.
"Well, that has been tried so often, and has it ever worked? It's open to the question whether the dead do not fail to show up because they are forbidden to communicate with the living; and you are just where you were, as to the main point. No, I don't see any way out of it." Mrs. Alderling went into the house and came out with a book in her hand, and her fingers in it at two places.
Alderling was no more to be censured for the refuge which her nerves sought from the situation in over-eating than Alderling for the smoking in which he escaped from the pressure they both felt from one another; and she was not less fitted than he for their joint experience. I do not suppose it was with the notion of keeping her weight down that Mrs.
Alderling which ought to have its weight against any undue appeal I have been making in her behalf. Without in the least blaming her, I will say that I think that Mrs. Alderling ate too much.
In your 'Quests of the Occult," Alderling broke off, with a kind of superiority that was of almost the quality of contempt, "I believe you don't allow yourself to be daunted by a diametrical difference of opinion among the witnesses of an occurrence, as to its nature, or as to its reality, even?" "Not exactly that," I said.
"We haven't a whole set of china in the house, from exchanging it across the table, and I haven't made a study of Marion you must have noticed how many Marions there were that she hasn't thrown at my head. Especially the Madonnas. She likes to throw the Madonnas at me." I ventured still farther, addressing myself to Mrs. Alderling. "Does he keep it up all the time this blague?"
When I had emptied myself of my chaff, I perceived that the time had come. I glanced about for a seat, and was going to take that in which Mrs. Alderling used to pose for him, but he called out with sudden sharpness, "Not that!" and without appearing to notice, I found a box which I inverted, and sat down on.
She could only have been entirely herself in society, where, and in spite of everything that can be said against it, we can each, if we will, be more natural than out of it. The reason that most of us are not natural in it is that we want to play parts for which we are more or less unfit, and Marion Alderling never wished to play a part, I was sure.
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