Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart and in the sight of thine eyes, or ever thou goest to thy long home and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, or the dust return to the earth as it was. [11] Shivering once more, she repeated slowly: Or the dust return to the earth as it was. And as she took her head in her hands in order to stifle her thoughts, she suddenly felt, without having foreseen it, the mortuary form of her cranium through the living skin: the empty temples, the enormous orbits, the flat nose under the cartilage, and the protruding jaws. Horror! this it was, then, that she was about to become! With frightful lucidity, she had the vision of her corpse, and she passed her hands over her whole body in order to probe to the bottom an idea which, though simple, had never yet occurred to her—that she bore _her skeleton within her_, that it was not a result of death, a metamorphosis, a culmination, but a thing one carries about, a spectre inseparable from the human form, and that the framework of life is already the symbol of the tomb. A furious desire to live, to see everything again, to begin everything again, to do everything again, suddenly came over her. It was a revolt in the presence of death: the impossibility of admitting that she would never see the evening of the dawning day: the impossibility of understanding how this beauty, this body, this active thought, this opulent life of the flesh could cease to be, in its zenith, and go to rottenness. The door opened quietly. Demetrios entered. [1] _Jeremiah_ II, 2, 20. [2] _Hosea_ II, 5. [3] _Jeremiah_ II, 23, 24. [4] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 20, 21. [5] _Jeremiah_ III, 1. [6] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 22, 25. [7] _Nahum_ II, 7. [8] _Hosea_ IV, 14. [9] _Ecclesiastes_ IX, 7, 10. [10] _Ecclesiastes_ XI, 7. [11] _Ecclesiastes_ XII, 1, 5-7. II DUST RETURNS TO EARTH “Demetrios!” she cried. And she rushed forward. But after carefully dropping the wooden bolt, the young man remained motionless, and his glance betrayed such profound tranquility that Chrysis was suddenly stricken with a cold chill. She had hoped for an impulse of generosity, a movement of the arms, the lips, anything, an outstretched hand . . . Demetrios did not move. He waited in silence for an instant, in an extremely correct attitude, as if he wished clearly to disavow all responsibility in the case. Then, seeing that nothing was asked of him, he strode towards the window and planted himself in the embrasure to contemplate the dawn of day. Chrysis sat upon the low bed, with a fixed look in her dulled eyes. Then Demetrios began to commune with himself.