“Why no.” Fanny got up. “No, I shant move. I love my room. But if you could be so obliging as to remove that Church....” She laughed with her eyes gleaming differently from laughter.
Upstairs she lowered the shades. She undressed. Naked, she saw in the glass that she still wore her hat. Her brow ached. She let fall her hair, letting her cold hands run through its electric dusk. Ungowned in her sheet she lay through the thick night with hands clasping her arms beneath her breasts. She lay dreamless, moving very fast. When she awoke it was late and she knew she had gone far. There were red furrows deep in the flesh of her arms.
The night following ... sudden she emerged from the hot fog that held her. She is in the Church. Naked she stands before a stately mirror whose gold-tooled pediment crowned the blaze of her black hair and eyes. She struck her breasts with a firm fist. “You are cast out, you are vomited by Love.” She stands there burning in cold shame. Her mouth is open, and from it, like a white water, runs a moan. “What does it mean? Christ, what does it mean? Why was I hurt so? Why was I so given a high thought, high dream? I have been hurt. O Christ how it hurts so to be hurt without a meaning. Why?”
—This is a Church! She knew that Christ was coming. He was a man whom she knew. She could not see him, standing there beyond her: but each nerve of her lay in the impact of his presence.—He sees me! It was right that he should look upon her naked and shamed.—It is good, it is good. He looks on me and that is good. He looks on me because my hurt is an unmeaning hurt....
Her half-opened eyes, her half-shut hands, her outstretched knees and her thighs touched the warm smoothness of her bedclothes.—I am so tired! It was good in bed. She slept.
She walked downtown in the young summer morning. The air had a coolness like lilacs after rain. A man passed. Coming closer, sheer, the sight of the man tugged on the cheek and on the neck of Fanny. A man old and bent. Grey beard tangled from a face long furrowed: the eyes were blue and gentle and the brow was untouched.... His beard was a grey prayer. His face was his life. Above his life was his brow like a dawn above storm. “He was a Jew,” she whispered to herself. Then she remembered her dreaming and her moan.
* * *
... Something within her said: “There is no hurry.” Much within her said: “You have no life, you are broken. Why alive? You are broken and flayed by life. Life without what you have lost is a mere agony dying down, a slow starving, a slow suffocation.” But something within her said: “There is no hurry.”
Something within her stirred to say: “Even your hurt has a soul. Even the insult lying in your heart has a soul.” Then her hands worked faster. She had eyes then for her girls toiling in their mute slavery, that brought out love, like a cool mist rising from a morning sun, into the dismal workroom.
At times, eating her meat and enjoying it, laughing alone at a show, she found in herself assurance ... mad and blind howsoever ... like a babe’s lying within a womb.