It was October, five months after Anne's birthday. She was not to know
again the mood which determined her complete surrender. Supreme moods can
never be recaptured or repeated. The passion that inspires them is
unique, self-sacrificial, immortal only through fruition; doomed to pass
and perish in its exaltation. She would know tenderness, but never just
that tenderness; gladness, but never that gladness; peace, but never the
peace that possessed her in the woods at Westleydale.
The new soul in her moved steadily, to a rhythm which lacked the diviner
thrill of the impulse which had given it birth. It was but seldom that
the moment revived in memory. If Anne had accounted to herself for that
day, she would have said that they had taken the nine-fifty train to
Westleydale, that they had had a nice luncheon, that the weather was
exceptionally fine, and that well, yes, certainly, that day had been the
beginning of their entirely satisfactory relations. Anne's mind had a
tendency to lapse into the commonplace when not greatly stirred. Happily
for her, she had a refuge from it in her communion with the Unseen.
Only at times was she conscious of a certain foiled expectancy. For the
greater while it seemed to her that she had attained an indestructible
spiritual content.
She conceived a profound affection for her home. The house in Prior
Street became the centre of her earthward thoughts, and she seldom left
it for very long. Her health remained magnificent; her nature being
adapted to an undisturbed routine, appeased by the well-ordered, even
passage of her days.
She had made a household religion for herself, and would have suffered in
departing from it. To be always down before her husband for eight-o'clock
breakfast; to sit with Edith from twelve till luncheon time, and in the
early afternoon; to spend her evenings with her husband, reading aloud or
talking, or sitting silent when silence soothed him; these things had
become more sacred and imperative than her attendance at St. Saviour's.
The hours of even-song struck for her no more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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