"When it comes, I expect I shall leave Bridnorth. I confess I am not a Bombastes. I shall hide my shoes in my cupboard, but none shall step into them, nevertheless.
"I hate to say this and do not say it in any backbiting spirit. I know you will think you have to support me. You have not. Fortunately my share of what we girls have is enough to support me and enable me to bring him up as I mean him to be brought up. So please send me nothing. It would hurt me to hurt you by returning it.
"I do not think I can say any more. I count them up--six sheets of paper. Yet I believe you will read them all.
"Good-by."
IV
In the appointed time, Mary knew that the reality of her life had come to her. At the first opportunity after the sureness of her knowledge, she attended Holy Communion in Bridnorth church. It was not so much to pray she went, as to wait in that silence which falls, even upon the unimaginative mind, during the elevation of the host and all the accompanying ceremony of the rubric.
She asked no favor of her God. She waited. She said no prayers. She listened. It was a spiritual communion, beyond the need of symbols, above the necessity of words. Psychology has no function to describe it. It was her first absolute submission of both mind and body to the mystery of life. Here consciously, she felt she could do nothing. Here, as it might be, was the instant of conception. Whatever it was, whether it were God or Nature, this was the moment in which she held herself in suspension, feeling she had no conscious part to play.
When she rose from her knees, it was with an inner and hidden knowledge of satisfaction that she had passed successfully through some ordeal of her soul; that whatever it was within her, it had not failed in the supreme test of her being; that, in a word, she was a woman at last and that life had justified itself in her.
If such a moment there be as this instant of conception; if in her soul where no words conceal and no thoughts have substance, a woman can spiritually be aware of it, such an instant this was in the life of Mary Throgmorton.
From this moment onward, she set her mind upon definite things. In two months' time she had planned everything that she was to do.