In the first place, putting on one side all the extravagance of delirium, Sylvia was conscious of a change in her personality so profound and so violent, that now with the return of reason and with the impulse to renewed activity, she was convinced of her rightness in deciding to go back to her real name of Sylvia Snow. The anxiety that she had experienced during her delirium to make the change positively remained from that condition as something of value that bore no relation to the grosser terrors of hell she had experienced. The sense of regeneration that she was feeling at this moment could not entirely be explained by her mind's reaction to the peace of the hospital, in the absence of pain, and to her bodily well-being. She was able to set in its proportion each of these factors, and when she had done so there still remained this emotion that was indefinable unless she accepted for it the definition of regeneration. "The fact is I've eaten rose leaves and I'm no longer a golden ass," she murmured. "But what I want to arrive at is when exactly I was turned into an ass and when I ate the rose leaves." For a time her mind, unused since her fever to concentrated thinking, wandered off into the tale of Apuleius. She wished vaguely that she had the volume so inscribed by Michael Fane with her in Petersburg, but she had left it behind at Mulberry Cottage. It was some time before she brought herself back to the realization that the details of the Roman story had not the least bearing upon her meditation, and that the symbolism of the enchanted transformation and the recovery of human shape by eating rose leaves had been an essentially modern and romantic gloss upon the old author. This gloss, however, had served extraordinarily well to symbolize her state of mind before she had been ill, and she was not going to abandon it now. "I must have had an experience once that fitted in with the idea, or it would not recur to me like this with such an imputation of significance." Sylvia thought hard for a while; the nun on day duty was pecking away at a medicine-bottle, and the busy little noise competed with her thoughts, so that she was determined before the nun could achieve her purpose with the medicine-bottle to discover when she became a golden ass. Suddenly the answer flashed across her mind; at the same moment the nun triumphed over her bottle and the ward was absolutely still again. "I became a golden ass when I married Philip and I ate the rose leaves when Arthur refused to marry me." This solution of the problem, though she knew that it was not radically more satisfying than the defeat of a toy puzzle, was nevertheless wonderfully comforting, so comforting that she fell asleep and woke up late in the afternoon, refreshingly alert and eager to resume her unraveling of the tangled skein. "I became a golden ass when I married Philip," she repeated to herself.