She knelt down by her bed.  She had been used to pray there with her eyes fixed upon the crucifix which he had given her.  It hung low, almost between the pillows of their bed.  Now she closed her eyes to shut it from her sight.  It was then that she realised what had been done to her.  With the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid, that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made visible.  The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady Cayley.  Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into the red, vaporous light.  She could not see her husband, but she had a sickening sense that he was there, looming, and that his image, too, would leap into sight at some signal of her unwilling thought.  She knew that that back room would remain, built up indestructibly in the fabric of her mind.  It would be set apart for ever for the phantom of her husband and her husband’s mistress.  By a tremendous effort of will she shut the door on it.  There it must be for ever, but wherever she looked, she would not look there; much less allow herself to dwell in the unclean place.  It was not to think of that woman, his mistress, that she had gone down on her knees.  To think of her was contamination.  After all, the woman had no power over her inner life.  She was not forced to think of her.  She had her sanctuary and her way of escape.

But before she could get there she had to struggle against the fatigue which came of her effort not to think.  Once she would have resigned herself to this physical lassitude, mistaking it for the sinking of the soul in the beatific self-surrender.  But Anne’s sufferings had brought her a little further on her path.  She had come to recognise that supine state as a great danger to the spiritual life.  It was not by lassitude, but by concentration that the intense communion was attained.  She lifted her bowed head as a sign of her exaltation.

And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal music.  Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly spaces—­they went by her like the passing of an immense processional:  “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in....”  It came on, that heavenly invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it.  And it was as if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had escaped into the peaceful blank.  She remained there a moment, in the place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where mortal emptiness draws down immortality.

She said to herself, “I have my refuge; no one can take it from me.  Nothing matters so long as I can get there.”