Why had she said "No," and was it not in reality another woman who had said it, and why had he been so quiet? It was not his way. There had been no storm. She shivered a little behind her gloves.
"Dearly beloved brethren," began the Precentor, pleading, impersonal.
Slowly her brain, like a little dark fish striking up from deep green waters, rose to the surface of her consciousness. What she was then most surely aware of was that she was on the very edge of something; it was a quite physical sensation, as though she had been walking over mist-soaked downs and had suddenly hesitated, to find herself looking down along the precipitances of jagged black rock. It was "jagged black rock" over which she was now peering.
The two sides of the choir were now rivalling one another over the psalms, hurling verses at one another with breathless speed, as though they said: "Here's the ball. Catch. Oh, you are slow!"
In just that way across the field of Amy Brandon's consciousness two voices were shouting at one another.
One cried: "See what she's in for, the foolish woman! She's not up to it. It will finish her."
And the other answered: "Well, she is in for it! So it's no use warning her any longer. She wants it. She's going to have it."
And the first repeated: "It never pays! It never pays! It never pays!"
And the second replied: "No, but nothing can stop her now. Nothing!"
Could nothing stop her? Behind the intricacies of one of Smart's most elaborate "Te Deums," with clenched hands and little shivers of apprehension, she fought a poor little battle.