But, uncertain still, she went over the matter again, putting to it little tests, passably naïf yet serviceable to her. She had ardently desired to marry Verplank, then, desiring as ardently a barricade against him, she had married Barouffski. In the one case the result had been catastrophic; in the other, calamitous. Doubtless she had sinned in the past and these disasters, brought about by her own desires, were her punishment. There were other things that she had desired. She had wanted to be loved, she had wanted to be thought a beauty, and not only her love had shamed her but soon she might be ashamed to show her face. At the thought of these things she realised anew and more profoundly than ever that selfish desire is the root of evil and that only in its extirpation may peace be had. But coincidently she realised also that any such extirpation was beyond her. Heredity, environment, the circumstances of her life, had given an impetus to desire which she could not arrest. She liked wealth, ease, pretty clothes, becoming hats, the society of agreeable people. She liked the world and in liking it she feared that she liked also the flesh, it might be even that she liked, too, the devil. Yet, she must not, she knew.
In telling herself that, she thought of the Church. The Church was so much more comfortable. There you were not asked impossibilities, the one requirement was to throw yourself in her arms and repent. As the facile process occurred to her she recalled George Moore’s story of Evelyn Innes. That masterwork seemed to tell her to do as the heroine had done and go in a convent.
Perhaps she might, she thought. Perhaps she must.
Several times already she had crossed and recrossed the garden. Now she found herself at the farther end facing the iron gate. Leilah opened it, walked to the corner and returned.
The little tentative evasion had been successful. At any time, unseen even by a servant, she could leave the house, disappear utterly, be forever ingulfed. But the knowledge that she could escape into darkness and be lost there, offered little more than a choice between tears. It presented a form of suicide which was superior only to actual death. She hoped she might be spared it. She hoped an appeal to Verplank would suffice, though in what manner it could best reach him, or, for that matter, reach him at all, she found it difficult to decide. To make it personally was impossible. To attempt it through Violet Silverstairs would involve an explanation and that was impossible also. The idea of employing one of her women occurred to her. There were manifest objections to such a course, though the particular woman whom she had in view she trusted entirely.
Slowly she returned to the house and went to her room. There, when at last the servants had gone and she was alone, she knelt on a prie-dieu and, to the Watchers of the Seven Spheres, prayed for the earthly peace of her soul and of his. She knew that no prayer could affect them, she knew that they are not to be propitiated or coerced, but it soothed her as prayer, in raising the vibrations, does soothe the distressed. The prayer concluded she began another. She prayed that sometime she might be somewhere, on some plane, where all things broken are made complete and found again things vanished.
Then, the solace of it still upon her, suddenly she saw by what the prayer had been induced. The consciousness confused and presently, in the melancholy sotto-voce of thought, she told herself that to extinguish that desire, she would have to be in Dharmakaya—the mystic state where there is oblivion of all things here.
“Here!” she caught herself repeating. For, at once, a passage from the Upanishads prompting, she remembered that here means Myalba, which is hell, the greatest of all hells and, for those of this evolution, the only hell there is.