the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious,
bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and
more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an
effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but
now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by
grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was
leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentments of
pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers,
and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten--
through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of
colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that
she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine . . . and
that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband's
boots--those horrible boots--and that no one would come to bother
her about the next day's dinner . . . or the butcher's book. . . .

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the
thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with
pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her,
now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer
night without stars. And into this darkness she felt herself
sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld
from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever
higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and
tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping
gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin,
to her ears, to her mouth. . . . Ah, now it was rising too high;