was a question of time and place.  What was right here was wrong there, but oneself was the one certain thing, and to remain with her father meant the abandonment of herself....  She wanted herself!  Ah, she wanted to live, and how well she knew that she was not living, and could never live, in Dulwich.  The nuns!  Strange were their renunciations!  For they yielded the present moment, which Owen and a Persian poet called our one possession.  She seemed to see them fading in a pathetic decadence, falling like etiolated flowers, and their holy simplicities seemed merely pathetic.

And in the exaltation of her resolution to live, her soul melted again into Owen’s kisses, and she drew herself together, and the spasm was so intense and penetrating that to overcome it she walked across the room stretching her arms.  It seemed to her more than impossible that she could endure Dulwich any longer.  The life of love and art tore at her heart; always she saw Owen offering her love, fame, wealth; his hands were full of gifts; he seemed to drop them at her feet, and taking her in his arms, his lips closed upon hers, and her life seemed to run down like the last struggling sand in a glass.

Besides this personal desire there was in her brain a strange alienation.  Paris rose up before her, and Italy, and they were so vague that she hardly knew whether they were remembrances or dreams, and she was compelled by a force so exterior to herself that she looked round frightened, as if she believed she would find someone at her elbow.  She did not seem to be alone, there seemed to be others in the room, presences from which she could not escape; she could not see them, but she felt them about her, and as she sought them with fearing eyes, voices seemed speaking inside her, and it was with extreme terror that she heard the proposal that she was to be one of God’s virgins.  The hell which opened on the other side of Owen ceased to frighten her.  The devils waiting there for her soul grew less substantial, and thoughts and things seemed to converge more and more, to draw together and become one.  She was aware of the hallucination in her brain, but could not repress it, nor all sorts of rapid questions and arguments.  Suddenly a voice reminded her that if she were going to abandon the life of the soul for the life of the flesh, that she should accept the flesh wholly, and not subvert its intentions.  She should become the mother of children.  Life was concerned more intimately with children than with her art.  But somehow it did not seem the same renunciation, and she stood perplexed before the enigma of her conscience.