Anna Victrix

But it was so sweet and satisfying lying there talking
desultorily with her. It was sweeter than sunshine, and not so
evanescent. It was even irritating the way the church-clock kept
on chiming: there seemed no space between the hours, just a
moment, golden and still, whilst she traced his features with
her finger-tips, utterly careless and happy, and he loved her to
do it.

But he was strange and unused. So suddenly, everything that
had been before was shed away and gone. One day, he was a
bachelor, living with the world. The next day, he was with her,
as remote from the world as if the two of them were buried like
a seed in darkness. Suddenly, like a chestnut falling out of a
burr, he was shed naked and glistening on to a soft, fecund
earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly knowledge and
experience. He heard it in the huckster's cries, the noise of
carts, the calling of children. And it was all like the hard,
shed rind, discarded. Inside, in the softness and stillness of
the room, was the naked kernel, that palpitated in silent
activity, absorbed in reality.

Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living
eternity. Only far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and
the destruction. Here at the centre the great wheel was
motionless, centred upon itself. Here was a poised, unflawed
stillness that was beyond time, because it remained the same,
inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted.

As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of
time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all
the slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life,
deep, deep inside them all, at the centre where there is utter
radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise:
the steady core of all movements, the unawakened sleep of all
wakefulness. They found themselves there, and they lay still, in
each other's arms; for their moment they were at the heart of
eternity, whilst time roared far off, for ever far off, towards
the rim.