In the ride to Greenwood he spoke little. Paula who sat in the carriage with him did not receive a word, though now and then his eye wandered towards her with an expression that drove the blood to her heart, and made the whole day one awful memory of incomprehensible agony and dim but terrible forebodings. The ways of the human soul, in its crises of grief or remorse were so new to her. She had passed her life beside rippling streams and in peaceful meadows, and now all at once, with shadow on shadow, the dark pictures of life settled down before her, and she could not walk without stumbling upon jagged rocks, deep yawning chasms and caves of impenetrable gloom.
The sight of the grave appalled her. To lay in such a bed as that, the fair and delicate head that had often found the downy pillows of its azure couch too hard for its languid pressure. To hide in such a dismal, deep, dark gap, a form so white and but a little while before, so imposing in its splendor and so commanding in its requirements. The thought of heaven brought no comfort. The beauty they had known lay here; soulless, inert, rigid and responseless, but here. It was gifted with no wings with which to rise. It owned no attachment to higher spheres. Death had scattered the leaves of this white rose, but from all the boundless mirror of the outspread heavens, no recovered semblance of its perfected beauty, looked forth to solace Paula or assuage the misery of her glance into this gloomy pit. Ah, Ona, the social ladder reaches high, but it does not scale the regions where your poor soul could find comfort now.
Bertram saw the white look on Paula’s face and silently offered his arm. But there are moments when no mortal help can aid us; instants when the soul stands as solitary in the universe, as the shipwrecked mariner on a narrow strip of rock in a boundless sea. Life may touch, but eternity enfolds us; we are single before God and as such must stand or fall.