"Isn't it glorious to be up here?" he cried. "I feel like the Sorenskriver himself—a silent, surly fellow suddenly turned light-hearted and eloquent. Knutty always said I ought to have been a Norwegian."
"And I feel like Jens," said Katharine, "an inspired person, with grand, big thoughts in my mind, which I shall lose on my way down to the valley again. Ak, ak!"
"What was your vision?" he asked. "Will you not tell me?"
"If you wish," she answered; "but it is not worth telling, really. I have never told any one. I don't know how I came to let those words slip out last night."
"Tell me," he said, turning to her.
"Well," she said, "I was going to have a slight operation to my mouth, and some anæsthetic had been given to me. I was trying my very hardest to keep my consciousness to the last millionth of a minute, when I saw a look of great mental suffering and tension on the surgeon's face. And I said to myself, 'I will be merciful to the man, and I will make a sacrifice to him of what I value most on earth at this moment: the tiny remaining fragment of my consciousness. He will never know, and no one will ever know; all the same, from my point of view, it is a deed of infinite mercy.' So I let myself pass into unconsciousness an infinitesimal instant of time sooner than I need have done. I heard him say, 'Now!' Suddenly I found myself in a vast region, which seemed limitless, which seemed to consist of infinite infinities which one nevertheless could see were finities blending with each other imperceptibly."
Katharine stood still a moment.
"And I realised," she continued, "how little I had ever known about the proportion of things, how little my mind had ever grasped the true significance of finities, which here were certainly infinities. I felt entirely bewildered, and yet wildly excited. Ever since I can remember, great space has always excited me. And suddenly, whilst I was wondering where to go, what to do, whom to reach, I saw a woman near me—a beautiful woman of so-called ill-fame. And she cried out to me:
"'This is heaven, and I am straining upwards, upwards, upwards through all the infinities until I reach God. For it takes the highest to understand the lowest.'
"And I went with her, and a dim vision of God broke upon me, and I knew no more. But I came back to consciousness, saying, 'For it takes the highest to understand the lowest.'"