She could not shake it off. To her all
things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless. Religion failed to touch
her state--religion, that is, in the only form accessible. The interior
of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of
some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to
say to her. But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the
door on its dead children with a heavy hand.--And she suffered this
religious coldness, although any idea that death of the body implies
extinction of the spirit, extinction of personality, never occurred to
her. Damaris' sense of the unseen was too ingrained, her commerce with it
too actual for that. No--the spirit lived on. He, her most beloved, lived
on, himself, his very self; but far away from her. In just this consisted
the emptiness, the unspeakable and blank bitterness--he was somewhere and
she could not reach him. The dreadful going away of his spirit, against
which she had fought during the thirty-six hours of his illness, had
reached its ordained consummation--that was all.
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