When the tea had been poured out and the plates set ready to hand, Maggie began.
“It seems perfectly dreadful of me to have any doubts at all, after all this; but … but you don’t know how queer it seems. There’s a kind of thick hedge—” she waved a hand illustratively to the hazels beside her—“a kind of thick hedge between me and Easter—I suppose it’s the illness: the nuns tell me so. Well, it’s like that. I can see myself, and Laurie, and Mr. Cathcart, and all the rest of them, like figures moving beyond; and they all seem to me to be behaving rather madly, as if they saw something that I can’t see. … Oh! it’s hopeless. …
“Well, the first theory I have is that these little figures, myself included, really see something that I can’t now: that there really was something or somebody, which makes them dance about like that. (Yes: that’s not grammar; but you understand, don’t you?) Well, I’ll come back to that presently.
“And my next theory is this … is this”—(Maggie sipped her tea meditatively)—“my next theory is that the whole thing was simple imagination, or, rather, imagination acting upon a few little facts and coincidences, and perhaps a little fraud too. Do you know the way, if you’re jealous or irritable, the way in which everything seems to fit in? Every single word the person you’re suspicious of utters all fits in and corroborates your idea. It isn’t mere imagination: you have real facts, of a kind; but what’s the matter is that you choose to take the facts in one way and not another. You select and arrange until the thing is perfectly convincing. And yet, you know, in nine cases out of ten it’s simply a lie! … Oh! I can’t explain all the things, certainly. I can’t explain, for instance, the pencil affair—when it stood up on end before Laurie’s eyes; that is, if it did really stand up at all. He says himself that the whole thing seems rather dim now, as if he had seen it in a very vivid dream. (Have one of these sugar things?)