The air was very clear, and to the long sight with which Sophia was seeing, seemed preternaturally so, as though everything were set in a vast crystal which made visible each pebble and grass-blade. A numbness stole over her body, her hands ached with cold before they, too, lost sensation, and in this numbed frame her consciousness gathered intensity. Then with a shock, as sudden as a plunge into cold water, her mind slid on to what seemed another though not an alien plane. Her mind's eye saw all the old points of view, the accepted angles of vision, as though torn up and scattered like flung wreckage over the shining shore of the world that swung below her; things which had seemed big were small, all relative sizes were altered, perspective itself seemed run mad, except that after the first breath the knowledge that this was the true angle swept over her--that she, or rather, the Person whose vision she was receiving, was looking at the spiritual world from the point at which she herself had vaguely imagined gazing at the physical. Round this spiritual globe she saw the Breath of God hang as the air hangs round the earth, and she saw it full of ebbing and flowing like a current-whorled river. She saw how no wind left emptiness where it had been, but how the elastic tissue thinned out, spread, gathered together, ran here and there so that no outflow was without its inevitable influence of contraction: the whole sphere of air was a medley of pattern, always rhythmic and interchanging. She felt how this elasticity was brought into play over the surface of the spiritual world, how actions, sins, pains of mind and body, rack this way and that as they would, were always enveloped by the divine Breath, even as on the material globe not a wave can break or a leaf stir but the river of air holds true. Always the movements of the Breath made a pattern, as invisible to the soul in the midst of it as the wind-pattern is to those on earth, a pattern inevitable in the sense that achieved beauty always strikes the eye, as being inevitable in its rightness. Then, this measure of universal comfort given, sensation narrowed and concentrated, not on her soul, but on the soul which had felt long ago, probably far more intensely, what she was seeing by it and through it now.