The Rainbow

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.