an custom as to
mistake a font for a matchbox? And if I said I was a Jew, good
heavens! she might think I had done it of fell design. What a wound to
the gentle old creature who had been so sweet to me! I could not stay
in sight of that accusing streak, I must walk off my uneasiness. I
threw open the outer door; then I stood still, paralyzed. Monstrous
evil-looking gray mists were clumped at the very threshold. Sinister
formless vapors blotted out the mountain; everywhere vague, drifting
hulks of malarious mist. I sought to pierce them, to find the
landscape, the cheerful village, the warm human life nesting under
God's heaven, but saw only--way below--as through a tunnel cut betwixt
mist and mountain, a dead, inverted world of houses and trees in a
chill, gray lake. I shuddered. An indefinable apprehension possessed
me, something like the vague discomfort of my dreams; then, almost
instantly, it crystallized into the blood-curdling suggestion: What if
this were divine chastisement? what if all the outer and inner
dreariness that had so steadily enveloped me since I had witnessed the
tragedy were punishment for my disbelief? what if this water were
really holy, and my sacrilege had brought some grisly Nemesis?"

"You believed that?"

"Not really, of course. But you, as an artist, must understand how one
dallies with an idea, plays with a mood, works oneself up
imaginatively into a dramatic situation. I let it grow upon me till,
like a man alone in the dark, afraid of the ghosts he doesn't believe
in, I grew horribly nervous."

"I daresay you hadn't wholly recovered from your fall, and your nerves
were unstrung by the blood and the nails, and that steak had disagreed
with you, and you had had a bad night, and you were morbidly uneasy
about annoying the old woman, and all those chunks of mist got into
your spirits. You are a child of the sun!"

"Of course I knew all that, down in the cellars of my being, but
upstairs, all the same, I had this sense of guilt and expiation, this
anxious doubt that perhaps all that great, gloomy, mediaeval business
of saints and nuns, and bones, and relics, and miracles, and icons,
and calvaries, and cells, and celibacy, and horsehair shirts, and
blood, and dirt, and tears, was true after all! What if the world of
beauty I had been content to live in was a Satanic show, and the real
thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray
lake under the reeking mists? I sneak