Then: “Perhaps some of my statues may live. That first bronze——”
She swept the sketches back into her arms, she thrust them into the hearth. It was cold and black. In a moment it blazed. But the sheets burned slowly, imperfectly. The fire went out. She had to scatter them and work upon them and light them several times with many matches before they were ash.
At last it was done. Stubborn confessional!
She laughed at the daubed papers that had not wanted to die.
She turned out the light and went once more into the bedroom. She opened the window wide.
The balmy night swept over her head into the room. Street slumbered. Brutal lines of the street seemed broken into curves: its hard stillness rose now and swayed, fell murmuring beyond her eyes.
Cornelia leaned heavy on her arms. She could feel the weight of her body against her elbows. This was the night and this was the world. The one world she had ever known: the one night also.
Why had all of it been? She saw herself. She must have been above and beyond herself; she saw herself from the back. She was leaning there, a slender girl, out of the window. She was a narrow form, swathed in warm brown silk-brocade, with a neck that was a little too long for such slight shoulders. And her elbows ached. And the window framing her led into the world. It was a round place: it went twirling about in interminable ether. It flung near blazing monsters like the Sun, that also were lost in the black, blind spaces so that their conflagrations were sparks flecking the universal slumber. Upon this twirling ball was life. Everywhere she looked, was life. One spot of earth was a city of creation, one drop of water was a multitudinous welter. Here, somehow, she. She could look beyond herself and the window and the gyring City. She could see the world and the stars and the Sun lost like specks in the universal slumber.
This was her yearning. Let her sleep! She was tired. Let her be one with slumber beyond creation. Out of slumber creation had come, creation which was a scum of eggs on a black flower. Let her brush it away. Let her brush it clean.
What she yearned was a thing more sure and real than world. Her eyes went out from behind where she stood yearning, passed the world in a flash. So small it was. Passed the stars that were dim above houses. The black Nothing was All. The stirrings of suns were flecks upon glow of black spaces.