XXIII


I.

The books stood piled on the table by her window, the books Miss Wray of
Clevehead had procured for her, had given and lent her. Now Roddy had
gone she had time enough to read them: Hume's _Essays_, the fat maroon
Schwegler, the two volumes of Kant in the hedgesparrow-green paper
covers.

"_Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kritik der reinen Vernunft_." She said it
over and over to herself. It sounded nicer than "_The Critique of Pure
Reason_." At the sight of the thick black letters on the
hedgesparrow-green ground her heart jumped up and down with excitement.
Lucky it was in German, so that Mamma couldn't find out what Kant was
driving at. The secret was hidden behind the thick black bars of the
letters.

In Schwegler, as you went on you went deeper. You saw thought folding and
unfolding, thought moving on and on, thought drawing the universe to
itself, pushing the universe away from itself to draw it back again,
closer than close.

Space and Time were forms of thought. They were infinite. So thought was
infinite; it went on and on for ever, carrying Space, carrying Time.

If only you knew what the Thing-in-itself was.