“I knew that I had been at peace.  I knew that I had been happy.  And yet, when I looked back upon my life as a novice and a monk, I now felt as if I had been happy vaguely, foolishly, bloodlessly, happy only because I had been ignorant of what real happiness was—­not really happy.  I thought of a bird born in a cage and singing there.  I had been as that bird.  And then, when I was in the garden, I looked at the swallows winging their way high in the sunshine, between the garden trees and the radiant blue, winging their way towards sea and mountains and plains, and that bitterness, like an acid that burns and eats away fine metal, was once more at my heart.

“But the sensation of loneliness was the most terrible of all.  I compared union with God, such as I thought I had known, with that other union spoken of by my guest—­union with the human being one loves.  I set the two unions as it were in comparison.  Night after night I did this.  Night after night I told over the joys of union with God—­joys which I dared to think I had known—­and the joys of union with a loved human being.  On the one side I thought of the drawing near to God in prayer, of the sensation of approach that comes with earnest prayer, of the feeling that ears are listening to you, that the great heart is loving you, the great heart that loves all living things, that you are being absolutely understood, that all you cannot say is comprehended, and all you say is received as something precious.  I recalled the joy, the exaltation, that I had known when I prayed.  That was union with God.  In such union I had sometimes felt that the world, with all that it contained of wickedness, suffering and death, was utterly devoid of power to sadden or alarm the humblest human being who was able to draw near to God.

“I had had a conquering feeling—­not proud—­as of one upborne, protected for ever, lifted to a region in which no enemy could ever be, no sadness, no faint anxiety even.

“Then I strove to imagine—­and this, Domini, was surely a deliberate sin—­exactly what it must be to be united with a beloved human being.  I strove and I was able.  For not only did instinct help me, instinct that had been long asleep, but—­I have told you that the stranger was suffering under an obsession, a terrible dominion.  This dominion he described to me with an openness that perhaps—­that indeed I believe—­he would not have shown had I not been a monk.  He looked upon me as a being apart, neither man nor woman, a being without sex.  I am sure he did.  And yet he was immensely intelligent.  But he knew that I had entered the monastery as a novice, that I had been there through all my adult life.  And then my manner probably assisted him in his illusion.  For I gave—­I believe—­no sign of the change that was taking place within me under his influence.  I seemed to be calm, detached, even in my sympathy for his suffering.  For he suffered frightfully.  This woman he loved was a Parisian, he told me.  He