“Try,” he said, “to think about God. Keep on looking at the crucifix.”
“If I look,” she whispered, “you won’t let go my hand?”
“I will not let you go.”
He held it till it was wrenched from him in the last agony.
She lingered for some hours in the room where these things had happened.
Its aspect was familiar and yet unfamiliar, and slightly repugnant to her. The altar, the crucifix, the lighted candles, suggested some tremendous and awful experience the details of which she was not able to recall. She seemed to remember that they had been connected in some way with the sheeted body on the bed; but the nature of the connection was not clear; and she did not associate the dead body with herself. When the nurse came in and laid it out, she saw that it was the body of a middle-aged woman. Her own living body was that of a young woman of about thirty-two.
Her mind had no past and no future, no sharp-edged, coherent memories, and no idea of anything to be done next.
Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen on an interior seen behind glass.
The bed and the sheeted body slid away somewhere out of sight. She was standing by the door that still remained in position.