It was positively, this effect, an excitement that carried her on; she went forward into space under the sense of an impulse received—an impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon. She was borne up for the hour, and now she knew why she had wanted to come by herself. No one in the world could have sufficiently entered into her state; no tie would have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside her without some disparity. She literally felt, in this first flush, that her only company must be the human race at large, present all around her, but inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be, then and there, the grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had of a sudden become her element; grey immensity was what her distinguished friend had, for the moment, furnished her world with and what the question of ‘living’, as he put it to her, living by option, by volition, inevitably took on for its immediate face. She went straight before her, without weakness, altogether with strength…

Henry James again. Milly Theale has just been served her death sentence. It makes her want to live.