For a time her mind, unused since her fever to concentrated thinking, wandered off into the tale of Apuleius. She wished vaguely that she had the volume so inscribed by Michael Fane with her in Petersburg, but she had left it behind at Mulberry Cottage. It was some time before she brought herself back to the realization that the details of the Roman story had not the least bearing upon her meditation, and that the symbolism of the enchanted transformation and the recovery of human shape by eating rose leaves had been an essentially modern and romantic gloss upon the old author. This gloss, however, had served extraordinarily well to symbolize her state of mind before she had been ill, and she was not going to abandon it now.
"I must have had an experience once that fitted in with the idea, or it would not recur to me like this with such an imputation of significance."
Sylvia thought hard for a while; the nun on day duty was pecking away at a medicine-bottle, and the busy little noise competed with her thoughts, so that she was determined before the nun could achieve her purpose with the medicine-bottle to discover when she became a golden ass. Suddenly the answer flashed across her mind; at the same moment the nun triumphed over her bottle and the ward was absolutely still again.
"I became a golden ass when I married Philip and I ate the rose leaves when Arthur refused to marry me."
This solution of the problem, though she knew that it was not radically more satisfying than the defeat of a toy puzzle, was nevertheless wonderfully comforting, so comforting that she fell asleep and woke up late in the afternoon, refreshingly alert and eager to resume her unraveling of the tangled skein.
"I became a golden ass when I married Philip," she repeated to herself.
For a while she tried to reconstruct the motives that fourteen years ago had induced her toward that step. If she had really begun her life all over again, it should be easy to do this. But the more she pondered herself at the age of seventeen the more impossibly remote that Sylvia seemed. Certain results, however, could even at this distance of time be ascribed to that unfortunate marriage: among others the three months after she left Philip. When Sylvia came to survey all her life since, she saw how those three months had lurked at the back of everything, how really they had spoiled everything.
"Have I fallen a prey to remorse?" she asked herself. "Must I forever be haunted by the memory of what was, after all, a necessary incident to my assumption of assishness? Did I not pay for them that day at Mulberry Cottage when I could not be myself to Michael, but could only bray at him the unrealities of my outward shape?"
Lying here in the cool hospital, Sylvia began to conjure against her will the incidents of those three fatal months, and so weak was she still from the typhus that she could not shake off their obsession. Her mind clutched at other memories; but no sooner did she think that she was safely wrapped up in their protecting fragrance than like Furies those three months drove her mind forth from its sanctuary and scourged it with cruel images.
"This is the sort of madness that makes a woman kill her seducer," said Sylvia, "this insurgent rage at feeling that the men who crossed my path during those three months still live without remorse for what they did."