ring a large public
ceremony. I ought to have gone down on my knees--but I had no
knees! I no longer had a body! There was no longer anything
anywhere in the world but Holiness--and my enraptured soul.

Holiness, then, was far beyond the Beautiful. I had not known this
till I saw it before me.

Life hurried me on: glowing hours and months succeeded each other.
In the autumn I fell in love. I came to the consciousness of this, not
gradually, but all in one instant. I had no chance of drawing back,
for it was already fully completed before I realised it. I came to the
realisation of it through a dream (sleep-dreams were always
exceedingly rare with me): on this occasion I dreamed a friend
showed me the picture of a girl to whom she said this lover (he had
been my lover for a year) was engaged. I awoke, sobbing with
anguish. I could not disguise from myself the fact that I must be in
love. When the time came to speak of it to my parents, my mother
would not hear of the marriage--there was no money: I must make
another choice. Two brilliant opportunities offered
themselves--money--position; but I could not bring myself to think of
either. Love was everything: a prolonged secret engagement followed. I
went into Society just as before. At this time an aptitude for
"fortune-telling" showed itself: it amused my friends--I told fortunes
both by palmistry, which I studied quite seriously, and by cards.
With both I went largely by inspiration. I found this "inspiration"
varied with the individual. There were many persons to whom I
could give the most extraordinarily accurate details of past, present,
and future; others moderately so; others were a total blank, in which
case I either had to remain silent or "try to make up." I got such a
reputation for this--I was so sought after for it by even total
strangers--that in a couple of years I pushed it all far away from me
as an intolerable nuisance.

V

The Faith that had been growing up in me was of a very different
form from that which I had had before: wider, purer, infinitely more
powerful, and, though I did not like to remember the pain of them, I
felt that those struggling years of doubt and negation had been worth
while--without those struggles I felt I never could have had so
powerful a faith as I now had. God was at an indefinite and infinite
distance, but His Existence was a thing of complete certainty for me.

Of the mode and means of Connection with Him I had no sma