'Of him?' asked Mrs. Doyne.
He thought. 'Well—of what I'm doing.'
'Then what, that's so awful, are you doing?'
'What you proposed to me. Going into his life.'
She showed, in her gravity, now, a new alarm. 'And don't you like that?'
'Doesn't he? That's the question. We lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world.'
Poor Mrs. Doyne, as if on a menace to her hard atonement, glared at this for an instant in deeper gloom. 'And why shouldn't we?'
'Because we don't know. There are natures, there are lives, that shrink. He mayn't wish it,' said Withermore. 'We never asked him.'
'How could we?'
He was silent a little. 'Well, we ask him now. That's, after all, what our start has, so far, represented. We've put it to him.'
'Then—if he has been with us—we've had his answer.'
Withermore spoke now as if he knew what to believe. 'He hasn't been "with" us—he has been against us.'
'Then why did you think———'
'What I did think, at first—that what he wishes to make us feel is his sympathy? Because, in my original simplicity, I was mistaken. I was—I don't know what to call it—so excited and charmed that I didn't understand. But I understand at last. He only wanted to communicate. He strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs out of his horror.'
'"Horror"?' Mrs. Doyne gasped with her fan up to her mouth.
'At what we're doing.' He could by this time piece it all together. 'I see now that at first———'
'Well, what?'
