Gradually, however, her rage died down before the pleadings of reasonableness; she recalled that somewhere she had read how the human body changes entirely every seven years: this reflection consoled her, and though she admitted that it was a trivial and superficial consolation, since remorse was conceived with the spirit rather than with the body, nevertheless the thought that not one corpuscle of her present blood existed fourteen years ago restored her sense of proportion and enabled her to shake off the obsession of those three months, at any rate so far as to allow her to proceed with her contemplation of the new Sylvia lying here in this hospital.
"Then of course there was Lily," she said to herself. "How can I possibly excuse my treatment of Lily, or not so much my treatment of her as my attitude toward her? I suppose all this introspection is morbid, but having been brought up sharp like this and having been planked down on this bed of interminable sickness, who wouldn't be morbid? It's better to have it out with myself now, lest when I emerge from here—for incredible as it seems just at present I certainly shall emerge one fine morning—I start being introspective instead of getting down to the hard facts of earning a living and finding my way back to England. Lily!" she went on. "I believe really when I look back at it that I took a cruel delight in watching Lily's fading. It seemed jolly and cynical to predestine her to maculation, to regard her as a flower, an almost inanimate thing that could only be displayed by somebody else and was incapable of developing herself. Yet in the end she did develop herself. I was very ill then; but when I was in the clinic at Rio I had none of the sensations that I have now. What sensations did I have, then? Mostly, I believe, they were worries about Lily because she did not come to see me. Strange that something so essentially insignificant as Lily could have created such a catastrophe for Michael, and that I, when she went her own way, let her drop as easily as a piece of paper from a carriage. The fact was that, having smirched myself and survived the smirching, I was unable to fret myself very much over Lily's smirching. And yet I did fret myself in a queer, irrational way. But what use to continue? I behaved badly to Lily, and I can't excuse my attitude toward her by saying that I behaved badly to myself also."
The longer Sylvia went on with the reconstruction of the past the more deeply did she feel that she was to blame for everything in it.
"I'm so sorry, Sister; I was talking to myself. I think I must really be very much better to-day."
The nun hastened to her bedside and asked her what she wanted.
"And yet I had the impudence to resent Arthur's treatment of me," she cried.
The nun shook her forefinger at Sylvia and retired again to her table at the end of the ward.
"Why, I deserved a much worse humiliation," Sylvia went on. "And I got it, too. The fact was that when I ate those rose leaves and became a woman again I was so elated really that I thought everything I had done in the shape of an ass had been obliterated by the disenchantment. Ah, how much, how tremendously I deserve the humiliation which that Russian officer inflicted. And then mercifully came this fever on top of it, and I have got to rise from this bed and confront life from an entirely different point of view. I'm going to start from where I was that afternoon in Brompton Cemetery, when I was speculating about the human soul. Obviously, now I look back at it, I was just then beginning to apprehend that I might, after all, possess a soul with obligations to something more permanent than the body it inhabited. What a fool Philip was! If he'd only nurtured my soul instead of my body. If he'd only not bit by bit dried it up to something so small that it became powerless to compete with the arrogant body that held it. I wonder if he's still alive. But of course he's still alive. He's only forty-six now. Really I'd like to write and explain what happened. However, he'd only laugh—he was always so very contemptuous of souls. Anyway, nothing will ever induce me to believe that my soul hasn't grown in the most extraordinary way during this fever. What a triumph she has had over her poor body. Where's that looking-glass?"
She called to the nun and begged her to bring the looking-glass again. The nun brought it and tried to console Sylvia for the loss of her hair.
"But I'm rejoicing in it," Sylvia declared. "I'm rejoicing in the sight I present to the world. Look here, can't you sit down beside me and tell me something about your religion? I'm absolutely bursting for a revelation. You fast, don't you, and spend long nights and days in prayer? Well, I am in the sort of condition in which you find yourself at the end of a long bout of fasting and prayer. I'm as light as a feather. I could achieve levitation with very little difficulty."