As a result of this crisis, Germinie fell into a state of dumb, brutish sorrow. For months she was insensible to everything; for months, completely possessed and absorbed by the thought of the little creature that was no more, she carried her child's death in her entrails as she had carried her life. Every evening, when she went up to her chamber, she took the poor darling's little cap and dress from the trunk at the foot of her bed. She would gaze at them and touch them; she would lay them out on the bed; she would sit for hours weeping over them, kissing them, talking to them, saying the things that a mother's bitter sorrow is wont to say to a little daughter's ghost. While weeping for her daughter the unhappy creature wept for herself as well. A voice whispered to her that she was saved had the child lived; that to have that child to love was her Providence; that all that she dreaded in herself would be expended upon that dear head and be sanctified there--her affections, her unreasoning impulses, her ardor, all the passions of her nature. It seemed to her that she had felt her mother's heart soothing and purifying her woman's heart. In her daughter she saw a sort of celestial vision that would redeem her and make her whole, a little angel of deliverance as it were, issuing from her errors to fight for her and rescue her from the evil influences which pursued her and by which she sometimes thought that she was possessed. When she began to recover from the first prostration of despair, when, as the consciousness of life and the perception of objects returned to her, she looked about her with eyes that saw, she was aroused from her grief by a more poignant cause of bitterness of spirit.