Sometimes the memory of her work would leap out when a conversation was
flagging, and lift her as she sat inert, to a distance whence the dulled
expiring thread showed suddenly glowing, looping forward into an endless
bright pattern interminably animated by the changing lights of fresh
inflowing thoughts. During the engrossing incidents of her day’s work
she forgot them completely, but in every interval they were there; or
not there; she had dreamed them....
With each fresh attack on the text, the sense of guilt grew stronger;
falling upon her the moment, having read the page of German, she set to
work to apply the discoveries she had made. It was as if these
discoveries were the winning, through some inborn trick of intelligence
not her own by right of any process of application or of discipline, of
an unfair advantage. She sought within her for a memory that might
explain the acquisition of the right of escape into this life within,
outside, securely away from, the life of everyday. The school memories
that revived in her dealings with her sentences were the best, the most
secret and the happiest, the strands where the struggle to acquire had
been all a painless interested adventuring. The use of this strange
faculty, so swift in discovery, so relentless in criticism, giving
birth, as one by one the motley of truths urging its blind movements,
came recognizably into view, to such a fascinating game of acceptance
and fresh trial, produced in the long run when the full balance was
struck, an overweight of joy bought without price.
There was no longer unalleviated pain in the first attack on a fresh
stretch of the text. The knowledge that it could by three stages,
laborious but unchanging and certain in their operation, reach a life of
its own, the same in its whole effect, and yet in each detail so
different to the original, radiated joy through the whole slow process.
It was such a glad adventure, to get down on the page with a blunt stump
of pencil in quivering swift thrilled fingers the whole unwieldy literal
presentation, to contemplate, plunging thus roughshod from language, to
language, the strange lights shed in turn upon each, the revelation of
mutually enclosed inexpandible meanings, insoluble antagonisms of
thought and experience, flowing upon the surface of a stream where both
were one; to see, through the shapeless mass the approaching miracle of
shape and meaning.