end lies five posts forward, and no further, and so get strength to pass them."
This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and factitious faith is better than no faith at all.
She passed five posts, and held on to the fifth.
"I'll pass five more by believing my longed-for spot is at the next fifth. I can do it."
She passed five more.
"It lies only five further."
She passed five more.
"But it is five further."
She passed them.
"The end of these railings is the end of my journey," she said, when the end was in view.
She crawled to the end. During the effort each breath of the woman went into the air as if never to return again.
"Now for the truth of the matter," she said, sitting down. "The truth is, that I have less than half a mile." Self-beguilement with what she had known all the time to be false had given her strength to come a quarter of a mile that she would have been powerless to face in the lump. The artifice showed that the woman, by some mysterious intuition, had grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may operate more vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect
