sely vain and selfish, often bitter and disappointed, filled with a
demon of competition, jealous, and full of empty, insincere smiles. I
perceived the chagrins from which they secretly suffered--the tears
behind the laughter. I was not in the least deceived or impressed by
any of them, but wondered how they managed to hang together and
deceive each other. More and more I looked for purely mental
pleasures. Mind was everything. I now began to despise my body--I
almost hated it as an incubus! Social successes or failures grew to be
a matter of complete indifference to me, and social life resolved
itself into being solely the means of bringing mind into contact with
mind. The question of fashionable environment ceased to exist for
me, but the question of how and where to meet with thinking minds
was what concerned me: it was not an easy one to solve in the usual
conditions of country life, with its sports and its human-animal
interests.

Finally, total mental solitude closed around me. In spite of my doubt
as to the existence of a woman-soul, I still felt the same piercing
desire and need for God--the acquisition of knowledge in no way
lessened this pain. What, after all, is knowledge by itself? The light
of the highest human intelligence seems hardly greater than the wan
lamp of a diminutive glow-worm, surrounded by the vastness of the
night. In sorrow, in trouble, in pain, could knowledge or the mind do
so much more for me than the despised body? No, something more
than the intelligence was needed to give life any sense of adequacy:
even human love was insufficient. God Himself was needed, and the
ever-recurring necessity would force itself upon me of the need for a
personal direct connection with God.

I continued to find it utterly impossible to achieve this. Mere faith
by no means fulfilled my requirements. God, then, remained
inaccessible--the mind fell back from every attempt to reach Him.
He was unknowable, yet not unthinkable--that is to say, He was not
unthinkable as Being, but only in particularisation and in realisation.
I could know Him to Be; but in that alone where was any
consolation?--I found it totally inadequate. It was some form of
personal Contact that was needed; but if my mind failed to reach this,
with what else should I reach it? Ah, I was infinitely too small for
this terrible mystery; but, small as I was, how I could suffer! Why
this suffering? Why would He not show Himself? Harsh, rebellious,