light, was dreaming of its future, and indulging itself in its dream. . . . Suddenly, she went beyond her depth. There occurred one of those lapses of consciousness such as she had experienced last autumn, here and there, in Burgundy; one of those voids into which one sinks. . . . Voids? No, they were not voids; but what went on in their depths? Those strange phenomena, unperceived, perhaps non-existent until ten months before, that had been released especially since the amorous crisis of the summer, and since then had become more frequent. Annette had a vague feeling that these gulfs of consciousness sometimes opened at night, too, while she slept . . . the heavy sleep of hypnosis. . . . When she came out of them, she returned from a great distance; there remained no memory of them, and yet she had the haunting sense that she had encountered important events and worlds, unspeakable things, things beyond what the reason permits and tolerates, bestial and superhuman, reminiscent of the Greek monsters or the cathedral gargoyles. A formless clay adhered to her fingers. One felt oneself bound alive to that stranger of one's dreams. There weighed a sorrow, a shame, the fresh burden of a complicity that could not be defined. One's skin remained impregnated by an unsavory odor that lingered for days. It was as though one bore a secret, in the midst of the day's fugitive images, hidden behind the closed door of a smooth forehead unwrinkled by thought, while one's indifferent eyes turned inward, and one's hands lay sagely folded across one's breast--a sleeping lake. . . . Wherever she went, Annette carried this perpetual dream: in the bustle of streets, in the studious torpor of lectures and libraries, in the amiable banality of drawing-room conversations, relieved by a hint of flirtation and irony. At evening parties more than one person noticed the absent glance of this young girl who smiled distractedly, less at what was said to her than at what she was saying to herself, while she caught by chance a few passing words, and then went far away again, listening to no-one-knew-what hidden birds in the depths of her aviary. So noisy was the chorus of little people within Annette that one day she caught herself listening to it when Sylvie was with her,--Sylvie the beloved, laughing at her, deafening her with her dear chatter, saying to her. . . . What was it she was saying? . . . Sylvie perceived it, and she laughingly shook her. "You're asleep, you're asleep, Annette!" Annette protested. "Yes, yes, I saw you, you are dreaming standing up, like an old carriage horse. What do you do with your nights?" "Wretch! . . . And what about yours, if I asked you? . . ." "Mine? You want to know? Very well! I'm going to tell you. You won't be bored." "No! No!" exclaimed Annette, laughing, now thoroughly awake. She clapped her hand over her sister's mouth. But Sylvie freed herself and, seizing Annette's head, looked straight into her eyes.