“Like me? Nonsense, child! Your mouth a little perhaps. Let me see? Yes, possibly a very little. But you have not, and never will have, my wonderful eyes. Have you ever seen eyes like mine? I have never met ay one who has. The young priest at Cammaiuola, our nearest village, whom I am helping and teaching, says my eyes seem always to be gazing straight into Heaven. Yours, Joanna, when they stop dreaming, will have the earthward gaze. I can see and feel it. No, don’t argue with me. Aunt Perdy knows these things. You will love with an earthly love, and you will suffer, as all those born in March must suffer, shedding tears that are sweeter than the smiles of others. But it is not yet clear if you will ever attain to the Universal, the Soul-love, which is mine. Why is it I can go about alone here without fear, at any hour of the night or day – here among these mountains where there are so many brutal men? It is because I have the perfect love which casteth out fear. If my bosom and my wonderful eyes were to fire a man’s passion, so that it entered his heart to do me a wrong, I should take him tenderly in my arms and give him freely all the love he is capable of taking. (Men are thirsting for such love, Joanna, though they may not be aware of it: and few women there are who have it to give.) Then he will go on his way a happier man. And when the fumes of wine or lust have gone from his brain he will know that he has been embraced by one whose soul is already in Heaven looking on the brightness of the Lamb, though her ageing body still walks the earth.”

As she spoke – almost chanting in her ecstasy – Aunt Perdy’s face grew more and more radiant, her eyes more madly luminous, till Joanna could not bear to look at her.

Gladly the girl would have escaped; and not from her aunt’s rapture alone, but from the strong, terrifying response there was to that rapture in herself. She shrank from the deep exposure.

But as she could not escape, she held herself like stone, sitting there on the edge of the bed and staring at the herring bone tweed. And the elder woman found her stolid.

Neither silence nor interruption, however, could long stay the stream of Perdy’s speech; and it was still flowing steadily when later in the evening they sat downstairs eating their supper of artichokes fried among eggs in a great earthenware dish. Ordinary talk was impossible, and Joanna soon gave up the attempt. Perdy, even when she put a question, never allowed any one but herself to answer it. All she wanted was a listener. But so manifest was this need, that Joanna wondered how she ever managed to pass a day in solitude.