Grasping this, Joanna was yet more terrified. At first it had seemed to her that by the untimely death of her body, her proper self would cease to be. Now she saw that if her body dissolved into its elements at that moment she would more truly never have been at all. For that fusion between flesh and spirit in which alone is absolute being had not taken place in her as, yet. The spirit had been in her: the form of the word she had been designed to utter had been hers. But the two had stayed apart, and now they would go their several unfertile ways. Here was annulment indeed! Here was the empty returning of the word which God hated. Before ceasing to be, she must be. And to that end the disruption of her body must be deferred yet awhile. The flesh must be kept from its separate extinction till it had lived again and anew, interpenetrated by the returning spirit, and so serving its purpose.

The question that now grew every moment more urgent was how this might be done. How save her body when she could neither rest nor eat nor sleep? While she did nothing but think, the unravelling was steadily going forward. Soon she would be too late.

As these fears swept her distracted being, memories of Aunt Perdy began to present themselves. Tentative at first, they became persistent. Aunt Perdy had spoken of fleshly renewal, of death, of a new birth. She had spoken much and with authority of unseen forces that were in the air about us ever in attendance to help or to hinder.

And what was it that Aunt Perdy had said about the body being as a string of beads? … a shock of ripe corn … of its capacity for relapsing into a motion of such fine degrees that it was a kind of living stillness in which restoration came to it from every side?

Joanna slipped out of bed. She could smell the wallflowers on the dressing-table. The room was not quite dark, but of a negative grey dimness filled with triangular shadows. As she drooped, and sank, and came limply to the floor like a heap of grain that is softly flung down, she thought involuntarily of a field in which the meek sheaves are bowed together. She herself had fallen into something of the posture of an Oriental at prayer. And as she had fallen, so she remained a long while at rest. Her lax thighs ached violently, and her loins were wrung with a new pain as if some poison had suddenly revealed its course. But gradually the ache grew less and less; and when it was gone, instinctively as a woodland creature turns in its sleep, she let herself roll with a gentle heavy movement on to her back. Her limbs, all slack, went sliding and quivering their length upon the grey floor. Soon every inch of her lay there released. Not till that moment did she know how tightly strung she had been for the last forty hours and more.