She was stunned by the thought, and looked round her as if she expected inanimate Nature to take up arms for her against this fate.  Yet she did not for a moment think of taking up arms herself.  She had left the hotel without trying to see Androvsky.  She did not intend to return to it till he was gone.  The idea of seeking him never came into her mind.  There is an intensity of feeling that generates action, but there is a greater intensity of feeling that renders action impossible, the feeling that seems to turn a human being into a shell of stone within which burn all the fires of creation.  Domini knew that she would not move out of the fumoir till the train was creeping along the river-bed on its way from Beni-Mora.

She had laid down the Imitation upon the seat by her side, and now she took it up.  The sight of its familiar pages made her think for the first time, “Do I love God any more?” And immediately afterwards came the thought:  “Have I ever loved him?” The knowledge of her love for Androvsky, for this body that she had seen, for this soul that she had seen through the body like a flame through glass, made her believe just then that if she had ever thought—­and certainly she had thought—­that she loved a being whom she had never seen, never even imaginatively projected, she had deceived herself.  The act of faith was not impossible, but the act of love for the object on which that faith was concentrated now seemed to her impossible.  For her body, that remained passive, was full of a riot, a fury of life.  The flesh that had slept was awakened and knew itself.  And she could no longer feel that she could love that which her flesh could not touch, that which could not touch her flesh.  And she said to herself, without terror, even without regret, “I do not love, I never have loved, God.”

She looked into the book: 

“Unspeakable, indeed, is the sweetness of thy contemplation, which thou bestowest on them that love thee.”

The sweetness of thy contemplation!  She remembered Androvsky’s face looking at her out of the heart of the sun as they met for the first time in the blue country.  In that moment she put him consciously in the place of God, and there was nothing within her to say, “You are committing mortal sin.”

She looked into the book once more and her eyes fell upon the words which she had read on her first morning in Beni-Mora: 

“Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not.  When weary it is not tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth upwards and securely passeth through all.  Whosoever loveth knoweth the cry of this voice.”