ave not told you, day by day, into my ears. It was the history,
you see, of a passion that was mainly physical. I will not say entirely.
I do not know whether any great passion can be entirely physical. But it
was the history of the passion of one body for another body, and he
did not attempt to present it to me as anything else. This man made me
understand the meaning of the body. I had never understood it before.
I had never suspected the immensity of the meaning there is in physical
things. I had never comprehended the flesh. Now I comprehended it.
Loneliness rushed upon me, devoured me--loneliness of the body. 'God is
a spirit and those that worship him must worship him in spirit.' Now I
felt that to worship in spirit was not enough. I even felt that it was
scarcely anything. Again I thought of my life as the life of a skeleton
in a world of skeletons. Again the chapel was as a valley of dry bones.
It was a ghastly sensation. I was plunged in the void. I--I--I can't
tell you my exact sensation, but it was as if I was the loneliest
creature in the whole of the universe, and as if I need not have been
lonely, as if I, in my ignorance and fatuity, had selected loneliness
thinking it was the happiest fate.

"And yet you will say I was face to face with this man's almost frantic
misery. I was, and it made no difference. I envied him, even in his
present state. He wanted to gain consolation from me if that were
possible. Oh, the irony of my consoling him! In secret I laughed at it
bitterly. When I strove to console him I knew that I was an incarnate
lie. He had told me the meaning of the body and, by so doing, had
snatched from me the meaning of the spirit. And then he said to me,
'Make me feel the meaning of the spirit. If I can grasp that I may find
comfort.' He called upon me to give him what I no longer had--the peace
of God that passeth understanding. Domini, can you feel at all what that
was to me? Can you realise? Can you--is it any wonder that I could do
nothing for him, for him who had done such a frightful thing for me? Is
it any wonder? Soon he realised that he would not find peace with me in
the garden. Yet he stayed on. Why? He did not know where to go, what
to do. Life offered him nothing but horror. His love of experiences was
dead. His love of life had completely vanished. He saw the worldly life
as a nightmare, yet he had nothing to put in the place of it. And in the
monastery he was ceaselessly tormented