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but the one book that she poured over and came back to
again and again was the Revelation of St. John the Divine.
She never tired of contemplating the glories of the heavenly
Jerusalem; she pictured it to herself down to the smallest
detail, walked through every by-way, peeped in at every
door. She was blinded by the rays of sardonyx and
chrysolyte, chrysoprasus and jacinth; she rested in the shadow
of the gates of pearl and saw her own face mirrored in the
streets of gold like transparent glass. Often she wondered
what she and Lucie and Aunt Rigitze and all the other
people of Copenhagen would do when the first angel poured
out the vial of the wrath of God upon earth, and the
second poured out his vial, and the third poured out his—she
never got any farther, for she always had to begin over
again.
When she sat at her work she would sing one long
passion hymn after another, in a loud, plaintive voice, and in
her spare moments she would recite whole pages from “The
Chain of Prayerful Souls” or “A Godly Voice for Each of
the Twelve Months;” for these two she knew almost by
heart.
Underneath all this piety there lurked a veiled ambition.
Though she really felt the fetters of sin and longed
for communion with God, there mingled in her religious
exercises a dim desire for power, a half-realized hope that
she might become one of the first in the kingdom of heaven.
This brooding worked a transformation in her whole being.
She shunned people and withdrew within herself. Even
her appearance was changed, the face pale and thin, the
eyes burning with a hard flame—and no wonder; for the
terrible visions of the Apocalypse rode life-size through
her dreams at night, and all day long her thoughts dwelt on
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