With Molly d'Exergillod everything had to be articulate, formulated, expressed. The whole of experience was, for her, only the raw material out of which an active mind could manufacture words. Iron-stone was of no use to man until he learnt to smelt it and hammer out the pure metal into tools and swords. For Molly, the raw facts of living, the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts and recollections, were as uninteresting in themselves as so many lumps of rock. They were of value only when they had been transformed by conversational art and industry into elegant words and well-shaped phrases. She loved a sunset because she could say of it: "It's like a mixture of Bengal lights, Mendelssohn, soot, and strawberries and cream"; or of spring flowers: "They make you feel as you feel when you're convalescent after influenza. Don't you think so? " And leaning intimately, she would press the rhetorical question: "Don't you think so? " What she liked about a view of distant mountains in the thunderstorm was that it was so like El Greco's landscapes of Toledo. As for love, why, the whole charm of love, in Molly's eye, was its almost infinite capacity for being turned into phrases. You could talk about it forever.
She was talking about it now to Philip Quarles -- had been talking about it for the last hour; analyzing herself, recounting her experiences, questioning him about his past and his feelings. Reluctantly and with difficulty (for he hated talking about himself and did it very badly), he answered her.
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