Next day she tried to discover her trouble to Georgie. She was almost speechless with shyness; but as they were sitting alone together at Duntarvie, drinking cups of chocolate before starting for town to buy young Sholto’s “shortenings,” she managed to put into poor words some part of her midnight thoughts.

The sisters in their black dresses sat facing each other across a small table in the green and white morning-room. Georgie, lolling back a little in her chair, showed all the pride of young and fruitful womanhood. Her eyes were absorbed and manger-worshipping, her face ruddy with health, her breasts large and sweet with milk. Joanna, as she rather painfully spoke, leaned forward – her elbows on the table and the tips of her fingers pressed against her temples as if the pulse there needed protection. And though she still looked very girlish, she was white-faced and harassed, with a faint shadow under each cheek-bone, and between her eyes the same sad, vertical line of perplexity which had been there at the time of Mario’s death.

Georgie broke in upon her halting questions with such ready and emphatic replies that Joanna immediately regretted having spoken. Having spoken she would listen. But here was no help to be had. Georgie, as her sister now realized, was enclosed and impenetrably protected by the immediate experience of her own motherhood. She was set on seeing in their mother’s death both release and happy fulfilment. For any declarations of imperfections in this world she was ready with assurances of perfections in the next. Above all she was generously up in arms against each word that might be construed as criticism of the dead. She would remember, she insisted, raising her voice, none but the good and beautiful things about her parents because only beautiful and good things were real. Faults and failures were best forgotten for the simple reason that they were of no vital importance. They had no lasting truth. They were but passing aberrations which, if we had more faith, we should not even see.

Was Georgie right? Joanna’s beseeching eyes rested on her as she discoursed more and more eloquently upon the non-existence of evil. And the younger sister felt so greatly at a disadvantage that she was almost inclined to repudiate her own experience. Was truth not best proved by such a union of physical health and spiritual satisfaction? Was Georgie not happier, more useful, immeasurably fuller of faith and certainty than she?

Yet for all that she could only look blank and miserable, feeling as Georgie’s spirit soared, that her own by that very action was being thrust further into darkness. There is a buoyant and genuine faith which, while ostensibly stimulating the faith of others, seems only to be able to swell itself at their expense. And while Georgie glowed and spoke of their mother, it was to Joanna as if the coffin lid were being screwed down afresh, this time more sacrilegiously on Juley’s soul.