e
was so lacking in blood and fire, so very like the stiff paper wrapping
of something else. But if these things were not real, what was real?
What might she not presently do? What might she not presently be?
Perhaps death had something to do with that. Was death perhaps no more
than the flinging off of grotesque outer garments by the newly arrived
guests at the feast of living? She had that feeling that there might be
a feast of living.

These preoccupations were a jealously guarded secret, but they gave her
a quality of slight detachment that added a dreaming dignity to her dark
tall charm.

There were moments of fine, deep excitement that somehow linked
themselves in her mind with these thoughts as being set over against the
things of every day. These too were moments quite different and separate
in quality from delight, from the keen appreciation of flowers or
sunshine or little vividly living things. Daylight seemed to blind her
to them, as they blinded her to starshine. They too had a quality of
reference to things large and remote, distances, unknown mysteries of
light and matter, the thought of mountains, cool white wildernesses and
driving snowstorms, or great periods of time. Such were the luminous
transfigurations that would come to her at the evening service in
church.

The school used to sit in the gallery over against the organist, and for
a year and more Ellen had the place at the corner from which she could
look down the hazy candle-lit vista of the nave and see the
congregation as ranks and ranks of dim faces and vaguely apprehended
clothes, ranks that rose with a peculiar deep and spacious rustle to
sing, and sang with a massiveness of effect she knew in no other music.
Certain hymns in particular seemed to bear her up and carry her into
another larger, more wonderful world: "Heart's Abode, Celestial Salem"
for example, a world of luminous spiritualized sensuousness. Of such a
quality she thought the Heavenly City must surely be, away there and
away. But this persuasion differed from those other mystical intimations
in its detachment from any sense of the divinity. And remarkably mixed
up with it and yet not belonging to it, antagonistic and kindred like a
silver dagger stuck through a mystically illuminated parchment, was the
angelic figure of a tall fair boy in a surplice who stood out amidst the
choir below and sang, it seemed to her, alone.

She herself on these occasions of exaltation would b