—Beating ... beating ... ache. I can pay for that dear woman’s breakfast. O I can never pay for what she did for me. I don’t have to. The woman was good. Good is what you need not pay for. Sun ... women doing good ... love ... sudden discoveries of You in a paid world. I am glad. I have not lost sight of Goodness. God? Does one have to pay for You, God? Or have I destroyed You, paying too much? Should I have refused to pay, when the sick voice of my soul said You must! Or haven’t I paid enough?... Can’t we know any thing, Lord?
She was aware of her hands beneath her, of the scissors, of the extended furry deaths against the filthy table.—We’re paying. We’re paying? For what?... Well, we’re paying.
She was strong.—I can keep this up forever. Perhaps I shall never die?
There was a starkness in her breast, as of a thought suddenly crystal, suddenly shaped of herself, crowding her organs.
—Shall I never die? Am I eternal, seeking ... seeking? Am I in Hell? Is Hell true after all, and am I in it? This is not Heaven!
She had the sense of an eternity in her hands paying, in her brow’s ache, paying.—Souls in Hell ... feel like this?
There lay Time beyond the lettered window. She looked on a neat little world of Time: Time ran upon steel tracks, Time carried mites of human life rigidly down a tiny way. The trains, the houses, the streets, the wisps of sunny cloud through the roof’s gap ... all was a pasty toy-world: make-believe: the world of Time and Space. She gazed on it in passionate condescension within her sooty workroom, hands paying, brow in search paying....
Outside. The day above the Town was lovely with Spring’s intimation. Soiled snow-piles melted in brackish streams. The gutters lay mud-splashed. Men and women moved drab, undifferentiate through the damp brownness of pavement. But like a wave of butterflies above a mudhole, Spring fluttered hesitant, diaphanous, young.
Fanny held her face up against downy wings.—My shoes are torn. She felt the down pull of her torn shoes under the wings of the Spring. She knew that because she felt such heaviness of feet, no one like her prized this afternoon.
She began to walk. She stopped.—You! It is you! The form, sudden and sheer in its familiar individuation—Clara Lonergan—stood before her still, with warm hands clasping her cold ones.