ideas running together into plans. And I know that I had come
out that day a broken and apathetic man.

Sec. 5

The next day my mood declined again; it was as if that light, that sense
of release that had shone so clear and strong in my mind, had escaped
me. I sought earnestly to recover it. But I could not do so, and I found
my old narrow preoccupations calling urgently to me again.

I thought that perhaps I might get back those intimations of outlook and
relief if I clambered alone into some high solitude and thought. I had
a crude attractive vision of myself far above the heat and noise,
communing with the sky. It was the worst season for climbing, and on the
spur of the moment I could do nothing but get up the Rochers de Naye on
the wrong side, and try and find some eyrie that was neither slippery
nor wet. I did not succeed. In one place I slipped down a wet bank for
some yards and held at last by a root; if I had slipped much further I
should not be writing here now; and I came back a very weary and bruised
climber, without any meditation....

Three nights after when I was in bed I became very lucidly awake--it
must have been about two or three in the morning--and the vision of life
returned to me, with that same effect of enlargement and illumination.
It was as if the great stillness that is behind and above and around the
world of sense did in some way communicate with me. It bade me rouse my
spirit and go on with the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring
and proliferating in my mind when I had returned to England from the
Cape. "Dismiss your passion." But I urged that that I could not do;
there was the thought of Mary subjugated and weeping, the smarting
memory of injury and defeat, the stains of subterfuge and discovery, the
aching separation. No matter, the stillness answered, in the end all
that is just to temper you for your greater uses.... I cannot forget, I
insisted. Do not forget, but for the present this leads you no whither;
this chapter has ended; dismiss it and turn to those other things. You
are not only Stephen Stratton who fell into adultery; in these silences
he is a little thing and far away; here and with me you are
Man--Everyman--in this round world in which your lot has fallen. But
Mary, I urged, to forget Mary is a treason, an ingratitude, seeing that
she loved me. But the stillness did not command me to forget her, but
only to turn my face now to the great work that lies before