And then there is the question as to whether or not this conversion-experience took the form of a vision. We have seen, in the Appendix, how considerable are the difficulties which beset the account of the Bleeding Christ Vision in the Palace; and how the story of the previous visionless experience in the Chapel is free from all such objections. But, even supposing the two accounts to be equally reliable, it is the first, the visionless experience, which was demonstrably the more important and the more abidingly operative of the two. More important, for it is during those visionless moments that her conversion is first effected; and more abiding, for, according to all the ancient accounts, the impression of the Bleeding Christ Vision disappeared utterly at the end of at longest four years, whereas the memory of the visionless conversion moments remained with her, as an operative force, up to the very last. Witness the free self-casting of the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into Love, into God (without any picturing of the historic Christ), which forms one of the two constituents of her great latter-day teaching; and how entirely free from directly historic elements all her recorded visions of the middle period turn out to be.[36] 3. _Peculiarities of her Active Penitence._ As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware of losing the sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous instrumentality, in which the negative and restrictive side of of her action stood towards the positive and expansive one. An immense affirmation, an anticipating, creative buoyancy and resourcefulness, had come full flood into her life; and had shifted her centre of deliberate interest and willing away from the disordered, pleasure-seeking, sore and sulky lesser self in which her true personality had for so long been enmeshed. Thus all this strenuous work of transforming and raising her lower levels of inclinations and of habit to the likeness and heights of her now deliberate loftiest standard was not taking place for the sake of something which actually was, or which even seemed to be, less than what she had possessed or had, even dimly, sought before, nor with a view to her true self’s contraction. But, on the contrary, the work was for the end of that indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards of her soul’s centre and widening out of its circumference, which she could herself confirm and increase only by such ever-renewed warfare against what she now recognized as her false and crippling self.