It was years now, growing on her like the loom of a Curse. It blackened and dried her life. She lived with it. All of her being was a shrunken point, veering blindly about in order to forfend some visitation so obscure and vast that she was nothing before it. If it was fearful that she knew nothing to bring her comfort, it was fearful as well that she knew nothing to knit her fear. She was a little swirling point under a sky that was black.
Sudden words came, like jagged movements in her mood. She said: “It is not for me that I am miserable. I do not want him for myself. God knows I have no hope of him for myself. It is not that.... God grant it be true that under this all, it is not merely that I want him for myself.... Oh, God grant it be only this! No other danger. I will face that. How gladly then I will give him up!...”
She buried her head in her arms, she prayed: she knew not what to pray for. She had the sense of an unholy loneliness, of praying to herself. She sprang up, wide-eyed, looked at her long, transparent hands: she said aloud: “Why am I alive?”
A thought came sweeping and cleansing: she was like a sea torn by swift winds, now suddenly a sheet of rain came down and smoothed it, soothed it. So a thought came glancing and offered peace.
“I do not have to live,” it said. And that in her which alone she did not question, which alone needed no words since her whole life was its Word, gave answer.
“No: what of him? With David in trouble, I must at least be here.”
Once more she was a sea churned by the winds of her dilemma.
But at least she had the faith that it was good for David that she should live. No faith this. Rather the matrix of her life—the hollow of the world in which lay her sea, however restless it beat....
Through the City walked Tom. He and his thoughts were a nimble line parting the City. Through the warm weather and the thick crowds of men and women he cut. Past the great loads of stone, he made his way. He was in Cornelia’s room; it was as if his path had left a wake—half fire, half blood—where his thoughts simmered and soaked into the living City.
“Cornelia,” he said to her, “what is there wrong with us?”