She passed the following days in self-contemplation, wandering through her dreams as through a new country, rich with great light, where distant landscapes paled into a wan radiance, like fantastic meteors in the night, quivering in incandescence on the horizon. It seemed to her as though she, a pious and glad pilgrim, were making her way along paradisaical oases towards those distant scenes, there to find even more, the goal.... Only a little while ago, the prospect before her had been narrow and forlorn—her children gone from her, her loneliness wrapping her about like a night—and now, now she saw stretching in front of her a long road, a wide horizon, glittering with light, nothing but light....
That was, all that was! It was no fine poets’ fancy; it existed, it gleamed in her heart like a sacred jewel, like a mystic rose with stamina of light! A freshness as of dew fell over her, over her whole life: over the life of her senses; over the life of outward appearances; over the life of her soul; over the life of the indwelling truth. The world was new, fresh with young dew, the very Eden of Genesis; and her soul was a soul of newness, born anew in a metempsychosis of greater perfection, of closer approach to the goal, that distant goal, far away yonder, hidden like a god in the sanctuary of its ecstasy of light, as in the radiance of its own being.
Chapter VII
1
Cecile did not go out for a few days; she saw nobody. One morning she received a note; it ran:
“Mevrouw,
“I do not know if you were offended by my mystical utterances. I cannot recall distinctly what I said, but I remember that you told me that I was going too far. I trust that you did not take my indiscretion amiss.
“It would be a great pleasure to me to come to see you. May I hope that you will permit me to call on you this afternoon?