Annette was bragging. It was not all delightful. She often felt cramped in her cloistered life. She was the kind of nun who would not have found it too much to have an abbey to manage and a God to love. The abbey was reduced to a fifth-floor apartment and God to her child. This was very little and yet it was immense. It was not what she was meant for, but she made a great deal of it. All her dreams turned round it, and with this sort of treasure she was well provided. If her everyday life was apparently puritanical and poor, she had her revenge in the life of her imagination. There, soundlessly and without friction, the eternal "enchantment" continued to flow. But how enter these retreats of the soul? The inner dream is not woven of words. And to make oneself understand, to understand oneself, one must use words. . . . That heavy, sticky paste which dries on the tips of the fingers! To understand herself, Annette sometimes felt the need of securing her dreams by telling them over to herself in a soft voice. But these recitals were not faithful transcriptions--scarcely transmutations; they took the place of the dreams without really resembling them. Lacking the power to seize the spirit in its flight, the brain makes up stories for itself that keep it busy and deceive it about the great fairyland, the inner drama. An immense liquid plain, a flooded valley brimming over, a shoreless river of fire, water and clouds. All the elements were still mingled there, a thousand currents as confused as hair on a head; but there was a force that curled these long dark locks that were spangled with gleaming lights. It was the countless-faceted Spirit and its troop of dreams, led by the silent shepherd to the shadowy pastures of Hope: Desire, the king of the worlds. A resistless gravitation drove them to the greedy slope, now gentle, now abrupt, that drew them down. Annette felt the enchanted river flowing; she rolled and unrolled on her distaff the skein of the entwined currents; she abandoned herself to it and played with the feline force that carried her on. . . . But when the reasoning powers were suddenly aroused and wished to control the play, they found that Annette, torn from her dream, was merely seeking for another that she might enter. So she soberly invented one out of the elements of her disciplined days--her memories, figures from the past, the romance of the life she had already lived or was still to live perhaps. . . . And Annette tried to make herself believe that the great dream was pursuing her. She knew it had fled, but she was not troubled. Like the bridegroom in the Gospel, it would return at an hour that no man knew.