"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" she cried, as she flung herself on her knees and tried to pray.
Yet although she could not see with her blinded eyes, she was environed with vitality and life, and the chamber was crammed with active intelligences. Round her were a crowd of cold, sad and loveless spirits, an ancestral line of implacable and embittered spectres—wives who had hated their husbands, men who had suspected and loathed their wives, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, with fathers and mothers who had in life regarded those bound to them with reasonless and undying abhorrence—too cold for vice, they were all virtuous as she was, with the pitiless virtue that crushed out charity with love.
They whispered constantly to her racked heart and throbbing brain, pointing with lean fingers to the bitter passages, leaving her not one instant of peace—spirits that had been tormented during their earth pilgrimage, and still remained on earth to pour their malign poison into the mortal and anguished spirits whom they influenced.
On the open pages hung that dense cloud of black and snake-like activity, the evil wishes and thoughts of so many beings who had lived and died creating those morbid conceptions. They were hideous and filmy monstrosities, with beastly heads and formless bodies, like the emanations of a putrid pond. Interlaced and coweringly they writhed about, with gaping mouths and slimy tendrils, so thick as they floated and hung amongst the space that they seemed like a dense black fog to the spiritualised vision.
This foul and icy living fog filled the chamber and covered both Bible and woman, spreading through the open window and over the city till London seemed
