The things I'm sorry for are not caring more for Papa, being unkind to Mamma, not doing enough for her, not knowing what she was really like. I'd give anything to have been able to think about her as Mark thought, to feel about her as he felt. If only I had known what she was really like. Even now I don't know. I never shall. But going to Richard--No. If it was to be done again to-morrow I'd do it. And I don't humbug myself about it. If I made Richard happy I made myself happy too; _he_ made me happy. Still, if I had had no happiness in it, if I'd hated it, I'd have done it for Richard all the same. IX. All this religious resignation. And the paradox of prayer: people praying one minute, "Thy will be done," then praying for things to happen or not happen, just as they please. God's will be done--as if it wouldn't be done whatever they did or didn't do. God's will was your fate. The thing was to know it and not waste your strength in the illusion of resistance. If you were part of God your will was God's will at the moment when you really willed. There was always a point when you knew it: the flash point of freedom. You couldn't mistake your flash when it came. You couldn't doubt away that certainty of freedom any more than you could doubt away the certainty of necessity and determination. From the outside they were part of the show of existence, the illusion of separation from God. From the inside they were God's will, the way things were willed. Free-will was the reality underneath the illusion of necessity. The flash point of freedom was your consciousness of God. Then praying would be willing. There would be no such thing as passive prayer. There could be no surrender.... And yet there was. Not the surrender of your will, but of all the things that entangle and confuse it; that stand between it and you, between God and you. When you lay still with your eyes shut and made the darkness come on, wave after wave, blotting out your body and the world, blotting out everything but your self and your will, that was a dying to live; a real dying, a real life. The Christians got hold of real things and turned them into something unreal, impossible to believe. The grace of God was a real thing. It was that miracle of perfect happiness, with all its queerness, its divine certainty and uncertainty. The Christians knew at least one thing about it; they could see it had nothing to do with deserving. But it had nothing to do with believing, either, or with being good and getting into heaven. It _was_ heaven. It had to do with beauty, absolutely un-moral beauty, more than anything else. She couldn't see the way of it beyond that. It had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this--streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life.