Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking,
striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever
changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations,
but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos,
grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical
solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she
could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing
Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree.
Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was rolling
round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably remote
horizons.
Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of
the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows
inexhaustible?
She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to
sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the
gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the
frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.
Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled
a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an under
voice to keep his boy's heart from succumbing to the spell of melancholy.
She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that was dreamlike.
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