All her life she had gone wrong about happiness. She had attached it to
certain things and certain people: Mamma and Mark, Jenny, visits to Aunt
Bella, the coming of Aunt Charlotte and Aunt Lavvy and Uncle Victor, the
things people would say and do which they had not said and not done: when
she was older she had attached it to Maurice Jourdain and to Mark still
and Mamma; to going back to Mamma after Dover; to the unknown houses in
Morfe; to Maurice Jourdain's coming; then to Mark's coming, to Lindley
Vickers. And in the end none of these things had brought her the
happiness she had seemed to foresee in them.
She knew only one thing about perfect happiness: it didn't hide; it
didn't wait for you behind unknown doors. There were little happinesses,
pleasures that came like that: the pleasure of feeling good when you sat
with Maggie's sister; the pleasure of doing things for Mamma or Dorsy;
all the pleasures that had come through the Sutcliffes. The Sutcliffes
went, and yet she had been happy. They had all gone, and yet she was
happy.
If you looked back on any perfect happiness you saw that it had not come
from the people or the things you thought it had come from, but from
somewhere inside yourself. When you attached it to people and things they
ceased for that moment to be themselves; the space they then seemed to
inhabit was not their own space; the time of the wonderful event was not
their time. They became part of the kingdom of God within you.
Not Richard. He had become part of the kingdom of God without ceasing to
be himself.
That was because she had loved him more than herself. Loving him more
than herself she had let him go.
Letting go had somehow done the trick.