William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the
Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth. But he had
known many more people, and was far more highly skilled in the art of
narrative than Rachel was, whose experiences were, for the most part,
of a curiously childlike and humorous kind, so that it generally fell to
her lot to listen and ask questions.
He told her not only what had happened, but what he had thought and
felt, and sketched for her portraits which fascinated her of what other
men and women might be supposed to be thinking and feeling, so that she
became very anxious to go back to England, which was full of people,
where she could merely stand in the streets and look at them. According
to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable,
or if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest anyhow, for
sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they
did. Nor were people so solitary and uncommunicative as she believed.
She should look for vanity--for vanity was a common quality--first in
herself, and then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their
share of it--and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve she
met; and once linked together by one such tie she would find them not
separate and formidable, but practically indistinguishable, and she
would come to love them when she found that they were like herself.
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