The sun was now long past the meridian and the old woman, quite worn out, threw herself back in her chair and desired Gorgo to let no one disturb her; nay, not to return herself till she was sent for.  As soon as Damia was alone she gazed at herself in a mirror for some little time, murmuring the seven vocables incessantly while she did so; and then she fixed her eyes intently on the sky.  These strange proceedings were directed to a particular end, she was endeavoring to close her senses to the external world, to become blind, deaf, and impervious to everything material—­the polluting burthen which divided her divine and spiritual part from the celestia fount whence it was derived; to set her soul free from its earthly shroud—­free to gaze on the god that was its father.  She had already more than once nearly attained to this state by long fasting and resolute abstraction and once, in a moment she could never forget, had enjoyed the dizzy ecstasy of feeling herself float, as it were through infinite space, like a cloud, bathed in glorious radiance.  The fatigue that had been gradually over powering her now seconded her efforts; she soon felt slight tremor; a cold sweat broke out all over her; she lost all consciousness of her limbs, and all sense of sighs and hearing; a fresher and cooler air seemed to revive not her lungs only, but every part of her body, while undulating rays of red and violet light danced before her eyes.  Was not their strange radiance an emanation from the eternal glory that she sought?  Was not some mysterious power uplifting her, bearing her towards the highest goal?  Was her soul already free from the bondage of the flesh?  Had she indeed become one with God and had her earnest seeking for the Divinity ended in glorification?  No; her arms which she had thrown up as if to fly, fell by her side it was all in vain.  A pain—­a trifling pain in her foot, had brought her down again to the base world of sense which she so ardently strove to soar away from.

Several times she took up the mirror, looked in it fixedly as before, and then gazed upwards; but each time that she lost consciousness of the material world and that her liberated soul began to move its unfettered pinions, some little noise, the twitch of a muscle, a fly settling on her hand, a drop of perspiration falling from her brow on to her cheek, roused her senses to reassert themselves.

Why—­why was it so difficult to shake off this burthen of mortal clay?  She thought of herself as of a sculptor who chisels away all superfluous material froth his block of marble, to reveal the image of the god within; but it was easier to remove the enclosing stone than to release the soul from the body to which it was so closely knit.  Still, she did not give up the struggle to attain the object which others had achieved before her; but she got no nearer to it—­indeed, less and less near, for, between her and that hoped-for climax, rose up a series of memories and strange faces which she could not get rid of.  The chisel slipped aside, went wrong or lost its edge before the image could be extracted from the block.