How foolish it was to prefer to such divine speech the stammering of spiritualists. For the first time in her life Sylvia prayed deliberately that what she saw as in a glass darkly might be revealed to her more clearly; and while she prayed, there recurred from the hospital that whispered confession of the little English governess. It was impossible not to compare it with the story of Mère Gontran: the coincidence of the names and the similarity of the situation were too remarkable. Then why had Mère Gontran been granted what, if her story were accepted, was a supernatural intervention to save her soul? By her own admission she had practically surrendered to Prince Paul when she had the vision of her future husband. It seemed very unjust that Miss Savage should have been utterly corrupted and that Mère Gontran should have escaped corruption. Sylvia went back in her thoughts to the time when she left Philip and abandoned herself to evil. Yet she had never really abandoned herself to evil, for she had never had any will to sin; the impulse had been to save her soul, not to lose it. It had been a humiliation of her body like pain, and a degradation of her personality like death. Pride which had cast her out had been her undoing. Looking back now, she could see that everything evil in her life had come from her pride: pride, by the way, was another attribute of the devil. Sylvia had a longing to go back to England and talk to the Vicar of Green Lanes. From the past kept recurring isolated fragments of his sermons, texts mostly, which had lain all this while dormant within her consciousness, until the first one had sprung up to flower amid her delirium. In all her reading she had never paid proper attention to the doctrines of Christianity, and she longed to know if some of these dim facts after which she was now groping were not there set forth with transparent brightness and undeniable clarity. Good and evil must present themselves to every soul in a different way, and it was surely improbable that the accumulated experience of the human mind gathered together in Christian writings would not contain a parallel by which she might be led toward the truth, or at least be granted the vision of another lonely soul seeking for itself salvation.