Answer:
Emancipated
Power
Spiritual
Explanation:
Which words from the excerpt describe Morris’s feelings about the absence of things?
1. First of all, she definitely feels emancipated. That's what she says about the emptiness of the house by the sea:
"Empty! Yes, thank Heaven! Furnish it? Heaven forbid!"
For a start, she simply states the fact:
"After I had been there an hour, there descended upon me a great peace, a sense of <u>freedom</u>, of infinite leisure."
For a while, she can't understand why it is so, but then it dawns on her that she is "emancipated from things."
2. The analogy between Morris and the old monks helps us understand why power would be the second choice.
"One wonders sometimes how they got their <u>power</u>; but go up to Fiesole, and sit a while in one of those little, bare, white-walled cells, and you will begin to understand. "
[There is a monastery in Fiesole, and a small hermitage (a place of religious seclusion) was built in 1399 on the site of the current monastery by the Franciscans.]
Monks are known for their asceticism, which means adopting a frugal lifestyle characterised by the formal rejection of material possessions.
3. And so we get the clue regarding the last word that could describe Morris’s feelings about the absence of things.
" If there were any spiritual force in one, it would have to come out there." (i.e. in that monastery in Fiesole with the hermitage).
So using the analogy with the monks who get their power and spiritual force from a place devoid of any material things, the reader can draw the conclusion that, in a way, Morris also feels spiritually empowered in the empty house by the sea:
"and in my heart I cherish an ideal, remotely typified by that empty little house beside the sea."
