“And then came Jenny’s letter. (I want to write about that rather carefully.)

“I said just now that I was getting to feel smaller and smaller.  That’s perfectly true, but there was still a little hard lump in the middle that would not break.  Things might have gone crumbling away at me for ever, and I might have got smaller still, but they wouldn’t have smashed me.

“Now there were two things that I held on to all this time—­my religion and Jenny.  I gave them turns, so to speak, though Jenny was never absent.  When everything religious tasted flat and dull and empty, I thought about Jenny:  when things were better—­when I had those two or three times I told Father Hildebrand about (...)—­I still thought of Jenny, and imagined how splendid it would be when we were both Catholics together and married.  But I never dreamed that Jenny would ever be angry or disappointed.  I wouldn’t talk about her to anybody ever, because I was so absolutely certain of her.  I knew, I thought, that the whole world might crumble away, but that Jenny would always understand, down at the bottom, and that she and I would remain....

“Well, then came her letter.

“Honestly, I don’t quite know what I was doing inside for the next week or so.  Simply everything was altered.  I never had any sort of doubt that she meant what she said, and it was as if there wasn’t any sun or moon or sky.  It was like being ill.  Things happened round me:  I ate and drank and walked, but the only thing I wanted was to get away, and get down somewhere into myself and hide.  Religion, of course, seemed no good at all.  I don’t understand quite what people mean by ‘consolations’ of religion.  Religion doesn’t seem to me a thing like Art or Music, in which you can take refuge.  It either covers everything, or it isn’t religion.  Religion never has seemed to me (I don’t know if I’m wrong) one thing, like other things, so that you can change about and back again....  It’s either the background and foreground all in one, or it’s a kind of game.  It’s either true, or it’s a pretense.

“Well, all this, in a way, taught me it was absolutely true.  Things wouldn’t have held together at all unless it was true.  But it was no sort of satisfaction.  It seemed to me for a while that it was horrible that it was true; that it was frightful to think that God could be like that—­since this Jenny-business had really happened.  But I didn’t feel all this exactly consciously at the time.  I seemed as if I was ill, and could only lie still and watch and be in hell.  One thing, however, Father Hildebrand thought very important (he asked me about it particularly) was that I honestly did not feel any resentment whatever against either God or Jenny.  It was frightful, but it was true, and I just had to lie still inside and look at it.  He tells me that this shows that the first part of the ‘process,’ as he called it, was finished (he called it the ’Purgative Way’).  And I must say that what happened next seems to fit in rather well.