第19章 AND HOW IT WAS FINISHED TOO SOON.(2)

Dawson, a handsome, high-spirited woman herself, may have found Dawson, as originally fashioned, trying to the nerves; though even then the question arises: Why have married him? But there is a difference, as Mrs. Dawson has pointed out, between a husband who hasn't enough of the natural man in him and a husband who has a deal too much. It is difficult to regulate these matters.

Altogether, and taking an outside estimate, the Doctor's opinion is that there may have been half a dozen, who, with Malvina's assistance, succeeded in hypnotising themselves into temporary insanity. When Malvina, a little disappointed, but yielding quite sweetly her own judgment to that of the wise and learned Christopher, consented to "restore" them, the explanation was that, having spent their burst of ill-acquired energy, they fell back at the first suggestion to their former selves.

Mrs. Arlington does not agree with the Doctor. She had been trying to reform herself for quite a long time and had miserably failed.

There was something about them--it might almost be described as an aroma--that prompted her that evening to take the twins into her confidence; a sort of intuition that in some way they could help her. It remained with her all the next day; and when the twins returned in the evening, in company with the postman, she knew instinctively that they had been about her business. It was this same intuitive desire that drew her to the Downs. She is confident she would have taken that walk to the Cross Stones even if the twins had not proposed it. Indeed, according to her own account, she was not aware that the twins had accompanied her. There was something about the stones; a sense as of a presence. She knew when she reached them that she had arrived at the appointed place; and when there appeared to her--coming from where she could not tell--a diminutive figure that seemed in some mysterious way as if it were clothed merely in the fading light, she remembered distinctly that she was neither surprised nor alarmed. The diminutive lady sat down beside her and took Mrs. Arlington's hands in both her own. She spoke in a strange language, but Mrs. Arlington at the time understood it, though now the meaning of it had passed from her.

Mrs. Arlington felt as if her body were being taken away from her.

She had a sense of falling, a feeling that she must make some desperate effort to rise again. The strange little lady was helping her, assisting her to make this supreme effort. It was as if ages were passing. She was wrestling with unknown powers. Suddenly she seemed to slip from them. The little lady was holding her up.

Clasping each other, they rose and rose and rose. Mrs. Arlington had a firm conviction that she must always be struggling upward, or they would overtake her and drag her down again. When she awoke the little lady had gone, but that feeling remained with her; that passionate acceptance of ceaseless struggle, activity, contention, as now the end and aim of her existence. At first she did not recollect where she was. A strange colourless light was around her, and a strange singing as of myriads of birds. And then the clock struck nine and life came back to her with a rush. But with it still that conviction that she must seize hold of herself and everybody else and get things done. Its immediate expression, as already has been mentioned, was experienced by the twins.