For she was persuaded that Steven also had his consolation.  He knew that she cared for him.  She conceived this knowledge of theirs as constituting an immaterial and immutable possession of each other.  And it did not strike her that this knowledge might be less richly compensating to Steven than to her.

* * * * *

Her woman’s passion, forced inward, sustained her with an inward peace, an inward exaltation.  And in this peace, this exaltation, it became one with her passion for the place.

She was unaware of what was happening in her.  She did not know that her soul had joined the two beyond its own power to put asunder.  She still looked on her joy in the earth as a solitary emotion untouched by any other.  She still said to herself “Nothing can take this away from me.”

For she had hours, now and again, when she shook off the slave-woman who held her down.  In those hours her inner life moved with the large rhythm of the seasons and was soaked in the dyes of the visible world; and the visible world, passing into her inner life, took on its radiance and intensity.  Everything that happened and that was great and significant in its happening, happened there.

Outside nothing happened; nothing stood out; nothing moved.  No procession of events trod down or blurred her perfect impressions of the earth and sky.  They eternalised themselves in memory.  They became her memory.

The days were carved for her in the lines of the hills and painted for her in their colors; days that were dim green and gray, when the dreaming land was withdrawn under a veil so fine that it had the transparency of water, or when the stone walls, the humble houses and the high ramparts, drenched with mist and with secret sunlight, became insubstantial; days when all the hills were hewn out of one opal; days that had the form of Karva under snow, and the thin blues and violets of the snow.  She remembered purely, without thinking, “It was in April that I went away from Steven,” or, “It was in November that he married Mary,” or “It was in February that we knew about Ally, and Father had his stroke.”

Her nature was sound and sane; it refused to brood over suffering.  She was not like Alice and in her unlikeness she lacked some of Alice’s resources.  She couldn’t fling herself on to a Polonaise of a Sonata any more than she could lie on a couch all day and look at her own white hands and dream.  Her passion found no outlet in creating violent and voluptuous sounds.  It was passive, rather, and attentive.  Cut off from all contacts of the flesh, it turned to the distant and the undreamed.  Its very senses became infinitely subtle; they discerned the hidden soul of the land that had entranced her.

There were no words for this experience.  She had no sense of self in it and needed none.  It seemed to her that she was what she contemplated, as if all her senses were fused together in the sense of seeing and what her eyes saw they heard and touched and felt.