All this stir and seethe of lights and people was but the
rim, the shores of a great inner darkness and void. She wanted
very much to be on the seething, partially illuminated shore,
for within her was the void reality of dark space.
For a time Miss Inger, her mistress, was gone; she was only a
dark void, and Ursula was free as a shade walking in an
underworld of extinction, of oblivion. Ursula was glad, with a
kind of motionless, lifeless gladness, that her mistress was
extinct, gone out of her.
In the morning, however, the love was there again, burning,
burning. She remembered yesterday, and she wanted more, always
more. She wanted to be with her mistress. All separation from
her mistress was a restriction from living. Why could she not go
to her to-day, to-day? Why must she pace about revoked at
Cossethay whilst her mistress was elsewhere? She sat down and
wrote a burning, passionate love-letter: she could not help
it.
The two women became intimate. Their lives seemed suddenly to
fuse into one, inseparable. Ursula went to Winifred's lodging,
she spent there her only living hours. Winifred was very fond of
water,--of swimming, of rowing. She belonged to various
athletic clubs. Many delicious afternoons the two girls spent in
a light boat on the river, Winifred always rowing. Indeed,
Winifred seemed to delight in having Ursula in her charge, in
giving things to the girl, in filling and enrichening her
life.
So that Ursula developed rapidly during the few months of her
intimacy with her mistress. Winifred had had a scientific
education. She had known many clever people. She wanted to bring
Ursula to her own position of thought.
They took religion and rid it of its dogmas, its falsehoods.
Winifred humanized it all. Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that
all the religion she knew was but a particular clothing to a
human aspiration. The aspiration was the real thing,--the
clothing was a matter almost of national taste or need. The
Greeks had a naked Apollo, the Christians a white-robed Christ,
the Buddhists a royal prince, the Egyptians their Osiris.
Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity
was a local branch. There was as yet no assimilation of local
religions into universal religion.
In religion there were the two great motives of fear and
love. The motive of fear was as great as the motive of love.
Christianity accepted crucifixion to escape from fear; "Do your
worst to me, that I may have no more fear of the worst." But
that which was feared was not necessarily all evil, and that
which was loved not necessarily all good. Fear shall become
reverence, and reverence is submission in identification; love
shall become triumph, and triumph is delight in
identification.
So much she talked of religion, getting the gist of many
writings. In philosophy she was brought to the conclusion that
the human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good.
Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products
of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear.
The motive of fear in religion is base, and must be left to the
ancient worshippers of power, worship of Moloch.