“There is nothing in particular,” said Hermia. “I am just unstrung. I feel like a raft in the middle of an ocean. I am disgusted with life. It must be because I am not well. I am sure that is it. There is nothing else. Oh, Aunt Frances, take me to Europe.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Dykman; “we will go if you think that traveling will cure you. But I cannot go for at least five weeks. Will that do?”
“Yes,” said Hermia; “I suppose it will have to.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
FUTURITY.
A few days later Hermia had a singular experience. Bessie’s youngest child, her only boy, died. Hermia carried her sister from the room as the boy breathed his last, and laid her on a bed. As Bessie lay sobbing and moaning, sometimes wailing aloud, she seemed suddenly to fade from her sister’s vision. Hermia was alone, where she could not tell, in a room whose lineaments were too shadowy to define. Even her own outlines, seen as in a mirror held above, were blurred. Of one thing only was she sharply conscious: she was writhing in mortal agony—agony not of the body, but of the spirit. The cause she did not grasp, but the effect was a suffering as exquisite and as torturing as that of vitriol poured upon bare nerves. The insight lasted only a few seconds, but it was so real that she almost screamed aloud. Then she drifted back to the present and bent over her sister. But her face was white. In that brief interval her inner vision had pierced the depths of her nature, and what it saw there made her shudder.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAOS.