Christina looked also from her window, but her thoughts were not
like Mercy's, for her heart was mainly filled, not with love of Ian,
but with desire that Ian should love her. She longed to be his
queen--the woman of all women he had seen. The sweet repose of the
sleeping world wrought in her--not peace, but weakness. Her soul
kept leaning towards Ian; she longed for his arms to start out the
alien nature lying so self-satisfied all about her. To her the
presence of God took shape as an emptiness--an absence. The resting
world appeared to her cold, unsympathetic, heedless; its peace was
but heartlessness. The soft pellucid chrysolite of passive heavenly
thought, was a merest arrangement, a common fact, meaning nothing to
her.

She was hungry, not merely after bliss, but after distinction in
bliss; not after growth, but after acknowledged superiority. She
needed to learn that she was nobody--that if the world were peopled
with creatures like her, it would be no more worth sustaining than
were it a world of sand, of which no man could build even a hut.
Still, by her need of another, God was laying hold of her. As by the
law is the knowledge of sin, so by love is selfishness rampantly
roused--to be at last, like death, swallowed up in victory--the
victory of the ideal self that dwells in God.

All night she dreamed sad dreams of Ian in the embrace of a lovely
woman, without word or look for her. She woke weeping, and said to
herself that it could not be. He COULD not be taken from her! it was
against nature! Soul, brain, and heart, claimed him hers! How could
another possess what, in the testimony of her whole consciousness,
was hers and hers alone! Love asserts an innate and irreversible