Quicksand
said, “for your evening treatment, and then you‘ve got to try to sleep for a while. No more visitors tonight.”
Helga nodded and tried unsuccessfully to make a little smile. She was glad of Miss Hartley‘s presence. It would, she felt, protect her from so much. She mustn‘t, she thought to herself, get well too fast. Since it seemed she was going to get well. In bed she could think, could have a certain amount of quiet. Of aloneness.
In that period of racking pain and calamitous fright Helga had learned what passion and credulity could do to one. In her was born angry bitterness and an enormous disgust. The cruel, unrelieved suffering had beaten down her protective wall of artificial faith in the infinite wisdom, in the mercy, of God. For had she not called in her agony on Him? And He had not heard. Why? Because, she knew now, He wasn‘t there. Didn‘t exist. Into that yawning gap of unspeakable brutality had gone, too,
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