to touch which
marks the difference between what is love and what is friendship.

If she now let herself go, took no drastic step, just let life carry
her on, she could have a strange and unusual, and, in its way, beautiful
friendship, a friendship which to a woman with a different nature from
hers might seem perfect. She could have that--and what would it be to
her?

She longed to lay violent hands on herself; she longed to tear something
that was an essential part of her to pieces, to scatter it to a wind,
and let the wind whirl it away.

She knelt down that night before getting into bed and prayed. And
when she did that she thought of Sellingworth and of his teachings and
opinions. How he would have laughed at her if he had ever seen her do
that! She had not wanted to do it in the years when she had been with
him. But now, if his opinions had been well founded, he was only dust
and perhaps a few fragments of bone. He could not laugh at her now. And
she felt a really desperate need of prayer.

She did not pray to have something that she wanted. She knew that would
be no use. Even if there was a God who attended to individuals, he would
certainly not give her what she wanted just then. To do so would be
deliberately to interfere with the natural course of things, arbitrarily
to change the design. And something in Lady Sellingworth's brain
prevented her from being able even for a moment to think that God would
ever do that. She prayed, therefore, that she might cease to want what
she wanted; she prayed that she might have strength to do a tremendously
courageous thing quickly; she prayed that she might be rewarded for
doing it by afterwards having physical and mental peace; she prayed that
she might be permanently changed, that she might, after this last trial,
be allowed to become passionless, that what remained of the fiercely
animal in her might die out, that she might henceforth be as old in
nature as she already was in body. "For," she said to herself, "only
in that oldness lies safety for me! Unless I can be all old--mind and
nature, as well as body--I shall suffer horribly again."

She prayed that she might feel old, so old that she might cease from
being attracted by youth, from longing after youth in this dreadful
tormenting way.

When she got up from her knees it was one o'clock. She took two tablets
of aspirin and got into bed. And directly she was in bed an idea
seemed to hit her mind, and she trembl