g dreary hymns were more wonderful than his orchestral dreams. Nor
did she find the spiritual stimulus she needed in Pater's _Imaginary
Portraits_. Some moody souls reflecting with no undue haste, without
undue desire to arrive at any definite opinion concerning certain
artistic problems, did not appeal to her. She put the book aside,
fearing that she was in no humour for reading that morning; and with
little hope of being interested, she took up another book. The size of
the volume and the disproportion of the type seemed to drag her to it,
and the title was a sort of prophetic echo of the interest she was to
find in the book. Her thoughts clouded in a sense of delight as she
read; she followed as a child follows a butterfly, until the fluttering
colour disappears in the sky. And before she was aware of any idea, the
harmony of the gentle prose captivated her, and she sat down, holding in
her heart the certitude that she was going to be enchanted. The book
procured for her the delicious sensualism of reading things at once new
and old. It seemed to her that she was reading things that she had known
always, but which she had somehow neglected to think out for herself.
The book seemed like her inner self suddenly made clear. All that the
author said on the value of Silence was so true. She raised her eyes
from the page to think. She seemed to understand something, but she
could not tell what it was. The object of every soul is to unite itself
to another soul, to be absorbed in another, to find life and happiness
in another; the desire of unison is the deepest instinct in man. But how
little, the author asked, do words help us to understand? We talk and
talk, and nothing is really said; the conversation falls, we walk side
by side, our eyes fixed on the quiet skies, and lo! our souls come
together and are united in their immortal destiny. She again raised her
eyes from the page--now she understood, and she thought a long while.
The chapter entitled "The Profound Life" interested her equally. The
nuns realised it, but those who live in the world live on the surface of
things. To live a life of silence and devotion, illumined not from
without but from within, the eternal light that never fails or withers,
and to live unconscious of the great stream of things, our back turned
to that great stream flowing mysteriously, solemnly, like a river! The
chapter entitled "Warnings" had for her a strangely personal meaning.
How true it