She hid her face from the anguish.
"You needn't. That's it. It rests with you."
"With me? If you would only tell me how."
"I can't tell you anything. It'll come. Probably in the way you least expect it. But—it'll come."
"Edie, I feel as if you held us all together. And when you've gone—"
"You mean when it's gone. When it's 'gone,'" said Edie, smiling. "I shall hold you together all the more. You needn't sigh like that."
"Did I sigh?"
As Anne stooped over the bed she sighed again, thinking how Edith's loving arms used to leap up and hold her, and how they could never hold anything any more.
Of all the things that Edith said to her that afternoon, two remained fixed in Anne's memory: how Peggy would suffer through overmuch loving—she remembered that saying, because it had confirmed her terror; and how love was a provision for the soul's redemption of the body, or for the body's redemption of the soul. This she remembered, because she did not understand it.
That was in August. Before the month was out they were beginning to give Edith morphia.