was inwardly urging her spirit to the buoyancy that cannot sink, to the
vitality that rides on chaos. She was not actively or consciously doing
this; in the strictest sense she was not doing it at all; it was doing
itself, obscurely and spontaneously, by the operation of subliminal
forces of which she knew almost nothing, and to which her personality
bore no more than the relation of a mountain range to unrecordable
volcanic fusions deep down in the earth.

When, after long withdrawal within herself, she changed her position,
sighed, and glanced about her, she had a curious feeling of having
traveled far, of looking back on the old familiar things from a long way
off. The richly wrought silver, the cheerful Minton, the splendidly
toned mahogany, the Goya etchings on the walls, things of no great
value, but long ago acquired, treasured, loved, had suddenly become
useless and irrelevant. She had not lost Tory Hill so much as passed
beyond it--out into a condition where nothing that preceded it could
count, and in which, so far as she was concerned, existence would have
to be a new creation, called afresh out of that which was without form
and void.

She experienced the same sensation, if it _was_ a sensation, when, a
half-hour later, she found herself roaming dreamily rather than
restlessly about the house. She was not anticipating her farewell of it;
it had only ceased to be a background, to have a meaning; it was like
the scenery, painted and set, after the play is done. She herself had
been removed elsewhere, projected into a sphere where the signs and
seasons were so different from anything she had ever known as to afford
no indications--where day did not necessarily induce light, nor night
darkness, nor past experience knowledge. In the confounding of the
perceptive powers and the reeling of the judgment which the new