She
still looked on her joy in the earth as a solitary emotion untouched
by any other. She still said to herself "Nothing can take this away
from me."
For she had hours, now and again, when she shook off the slave-woman
who held her down. In those hours her inner life moved with the large
rhythm of the seasons and was soaked in the dyes of the visible
world; and the visible world, passing into her inner life, took on its
radiance and intensity. Everything that happened and that was great
and significant in its happening, happened there.
Outside nothing happened; nothing stood out; nothing moved. No
procession of events trod down or blurred her perfect impressions of
the earth and sky. They eternalised themselves in memory. They became
her memory.
The days were carved for her in the lines of the hills and painted
for her in their colors; days that were dim green and gray, when
the dreaming land was withdrawn under a veil so fine that it had the
transparency of water, or when the stone walls, the humble houses and
the high ramparts, drenched with mist and with secret sunlight, became
insubstantial; days when all the hills were hewn out of one opal; days
that had the form of Karva under snow, and the thin blues and violets
of the snow. She remembered purely, without thinking, "It was in April
that I went away from Steven," or, "It was in November that he married
Mary," or "It was in February that we knew about Ally, and Father had
his stroke.
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