to been entirely free and in undisputed
mastery of her being. This was a time of the acutest agony. She would
not surrender. Without knowing what was being demanded of her she
cried, 'I will not, I will not.' But the forces stirring in her were
implacable, and changed her whole physical sensation of being. Her
body changed, her figure altered most subtly and imperceptibly, her
face gained in strength and beauty, but she loathed the change, because
it was taking place without reference to her own will, or her own
imagination, which for the first time in her life was baffled.... It
was appalling to her, who had always found it so easy to direct the
lives of others, to find her own life slipping with a terrible velocity
out of control.... No thought, no notion of her recent days was now
valid. At the very worst stage of all even simple movements seemed
incomprehensible. When she caught sight of her own lovely arm that had
always given her a thrill of pleasure, it now repelled her as something
fantastic and irresistibly comic, revoltingly comic at this time when
she was a prey to so much obscure suffering, so deep that she could
trace it to no cause, so acute that she could discern in it no purpose.

She found it almost her sole relief to read, and she devoured among
other curious works which she found at her bookshop, General Booth's
_Darkest London_ and Rose's _The Truth about the Transvaal_. Novels
she could not read at all. Fiction was all very well, but it ought to
have some relation to human emotions as they are. After her aerial
life in Charles's imagination she needed a diet of hard facts, and, as
usual, what she needed that she obtained. Both Booth and Rose dealt
with the past, but that made them the more palatable, and they
reassured her. The facts she was now discovering had been present to
other minds and her own had not unsupported to bear the whole weight of
them.... In her untouched youth she had always accepted responsibility
for the whole universe, and so long as her life had been made easy,
first of all by her grandfather, and then by Charles, the burden had
been tolerable, and she had been able to mould the universe to make
them comfortable. But now that life was suddenly for no apparent
reason incredibly difficult, the burden was greater than she could
bear, and it relieved her to find in these two books the utterance of
suffering consciences..... As she read Rose she remembered a saying