IV.
The sun had been shining for a fortnight. She could sit out all day now in the garden.
It was nonsense to talk about time standing still if you kept on moving. Just now, in the garden, when the light came through the thin green silk leaves of the lime tree, for a moment, while she sat looking at the lime tree, time stood still.
Catty had taken away the tea-things and was going down the four steps into the house. It happened between the opening and shutting of the door.
She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was God. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree.