"Yes, yes," Sylvia agreed. "I have expressed myself badly, and of course when I think of it I have been driven ever since the delirium really to accept just that. You can understand, can't you, the dread of presumption in my revolt against pride? "But by insisting upon what seemed to happen in my delirium I am giving you a wrong impression. It was when I came to myself again in the hospital that I felt changed. I longed then for knowledge of God, but I was afraid that my feeling was simply the natural result of weakness after a severe illness. I almost rejected God in my fear of supposing myself hysterical and egotistical. However, I did try hard to put myself into a state of resignation, and when I came out of the hospital I felt curiously awake to the sense of God and simultaneously an utter indifference to anything in my old life that might interrupt my quest by restoring me to what I was before this illness. While I was ill war had broken out, and I found myself utterly alone. Ordinarily I am sure that such a discovery would have terrified me; now I rejoiced in such loneliness. I deliberately turned my back on England and waited for something from my new life to fill this loneliness. I felt like some one who has swept and garnished a room that he may receive guests. My chief emotion was a tremendous love of the whole world and an illimitable desire to make up for all my cynicism in the past by the depth of this love. I went back to the _pension_ where I had lived before I was ill, and it seemed to me a coincidence that the woman who kept it should be a spiritualist and that for two months my mind should be continuously occupied by what I might call the magic side of things. The result was that, though I was often puzzled by inexplicable happenings, I conceived a distaste for all this meddling with the unknowable, this kind of keyhole peeping at infinity: it seemed to me vulgar and unpleasant. Nevertheless, I was driven back all the time in my meditations on the only satisfactory revelation of God, the only rational manifestation, which was Jesus Christ. Every other explanation crumbled away in my brain except that one fact. Then, although I believe it was only some fortune-telling with cards that first put the notion into my head, I was obsessed with the idea that I must go south. On my way I met a soldier at Kieff who bought me a golden bag for no other reason than because it seemed to him that to give pleasure to somebody else was a better way of spending his money than in gambling or self-indulgence. In the state of mind I was in I accepted this as a sign that I was right to go south. So you see that I had really arrived at the point of view of accepting the theory of a divine intervention in my favor.