so
Ellen as a girl never let her mind go quite easily into this reconciling
core of life, and talked of it only very rarely and shyly with a few
chosen coevals. It wasn't very profitable talk. They had a guilty
feeling, they laughed a little uneasily, they displayed a fatal
proclivity to stab the swelling gravity of their souls with some forced
and silly jest and so tumble back to ground again before they rose too
high....

Yet great possibilities of faith and devotion stirred already in the
girl's heart. She thought little of God by day, but had a strange sense
of Him in the starlight; never under the moonlight--that was in no sense
divine--but in the stirring darkness of the stars. And it is remarkable
that after a course of astronomical enlightenment by a visiting master
and descriptions of masses and distances, incredible aching distances,
then even more than ever she seemed to feel God among the stars....

A fatal accident to a schoolfellow turned her mind for a time to the
dark stillnesses of death. The accident happened away in Wales during
the summer holidays; she saw nothing of it, she only knew of its
consequence. Hitherto she had assumed it was the function of girls to
grow up and go out from the grey intermediate state of school work into
freedoms and realities beyond. Death happened, she was aware, to young
people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. This termination
came with a shock. The girl was no great personal loss to Ellen, they
had belonged to different sets and classes, but the conception of her as
lying very very still for ever was a haunting one. Ellen felt she did
not want to be still for evermore in a confined space, with life and
sunshine going on all about her and above her, and it quickened her
growing appetite for living to think that she might presently have to be
like that. How stifled one would feel!

It couldn't be like that.

She began to speculate about that future life upon which religion
insists so much and communicates so little. Was it perhaps in other
planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? She
perceived more and more a kind of absurdity in the existence all about
her. Was all this world a mere make-believe, and would Miss Beeton
Clavier and every one about her presently cast aside a veil? Manifestly
there was a veil. She had a very natural disposition to doubt whether
the actual circumstances of her life were real. Her mother for instanc