And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal music. Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly spaces--they went by her like the passing of an immense processional: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in...." It came on, that heavenly invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it. And it was as if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had escaped into the peaceful blank. She remained there a moment, in the place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where mortal emptiness draws down immortality. She said to herself, "I have my refuge; no one can take it from me. Nothing matters so long as I can get there." She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely conscious of her wound. So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman. Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to his embarrassment. Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of complacency; and complacency in the circumstances was more than Anne could bear. Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul. They lived a whole earth and a whole heaven apart. He was untouched by the fires that burnt and purified her. The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual moments that built her up again, passed by him unperceived. If she were to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not understand. And that was not the worst. She had learnt not to look for that spiritual understanding in him. It mattered little that her unique suffering and her unique consolation should remain alike ignored. The terrible thing was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)--meet her, and not be shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the violent reality. For one moment of repulsion she saw him no less gross. She wondered, would she have to reckon with that, henceforth, too?