She was thinking of the early departure in the raw morning cold, when the convoy that was leaving for South America would be driven away from the convent. But the Infirmarian shook her head and shuffled slowly away, leaving the room in darkness.
She was old and very tired, and for her there was no demain, except the glorious dawn that should herald the day of Eternity.
Alex lay awake in the merciful darkness and envisaged the culmination of long years of stifled repression and self-deception.
She knew now, as she had never let herself know before, what had sustained her through the dragging years after the final objective of her vows had been left behind.
She knew that she had thought herself to be answering to a call of God, when she had been hearing only the voice of Mother Gertrude, and had been craving only for Mother Gertrude's tenderness and approbation.
Physical pangs of terror shot through her and shook her from head to foot as she realized to what she had bound herself, which now presented itself to her overstrung perceptions only in the crudest terms.
To live without earthly affection, to relinquish love as she understood it, in terms of human sympathy, for an ideal to which she knew, with tardy and unerring certainty, that nothing within her would ever conform.
She knew now, with that appalling clear-sightedness to which humanity is mercifully a stranger until or unless the last outposts of sanity are almost reached, that the vocation of which they all spoke so glibly had never been hers.
She had entered a life for which her every instinct declared her to be utterly unfitted, in search of that which her few short years in the outside world had denied her. The convent instinct, engrained in her at last, added to the anguish of startled horror at the wickedness of her own state of mind.
God is not mocked, she thought. Alex had tried to cheat God, and for ten years He had stayed His hand and had allowed her deception to go on.