“Come out to the well and we’ll haul her up,” said the man. The little girl darted into the house, like a disappointed hobgoblin, and Geroid Latour followed the man to the well at the rear of the house. Suddenly he saw a mountainous washerwoman dancing on her toes over the black loam. Her sparse grayish black hair flapped behind her like a dishrag and her naked body had the color of trampled snow. An empty beer-bottle was balanced on her head. She had the face of an old Columbine who still thought herself beautiful. “A neighbour of mine,” said the man in an awed voice. “She was a ballet-dancer in her youth and every midnight she makes my back-yard a theater. In the morning she scrubs my floors. Here, in my back-yard, she chases the phantoms of her former triumphs. Moonlight turns her knee joints into miracles!” “Ah, from enormous wildness and pretence, squeezed together, comes the little drop of happiness,” said Geroid Latour, sentimentally. “My wife objected to my joining this woman’s midnight dance,” said the man. “To prevent her from informing the police, I killed her. I could not see a miracle ruined.” “Only the insane are entertaining,” answered Geroid. “The egoism of sane people is gruesome--a modulated scale of complacent gaieties--but insane people often display an artificial ego which is divine. The artist, gracefully gesticulating about himself, on his divan, is hideous, but if he danced on a boulder and waved a lilac bough in one hand and a broom in the other, one could respect him.” As Geroid finished talking the mountainous washerwoman drew nearer and stopped in front of the man. Blossoming glints of water dropped from her grayish white skin. “You haven’t killed me yet, my dear husband,” she shouted to the man. Then, snatching the beer-bottle balanced on her head she struck at him. Geroid fled to the front gate and sped down the road. Looking back, from a safe distance, he saw the mountainous woman, the man, and the little child earnestly gesticulating in the moonlight. POETRY Morning light anxiously pinched the cheeks of these poplar trees. The silver blood rushed to their faces and they blushed. The garden walls forgot their stolidity for a moment and seemed inclined to leap away, but became sober again, resisting the twinkling trickery of morning light. Airily suspended tales in light and colour, of no importance to philosophers, hung over the scene. Only a snail underneath the trees, steeped in a creeping evening, lived apart from the crisp medley of morning lights. Laboriously, the snail moved through his explanation of the universe. But, to blades of grass, their lives tersely centered in green, the morning was a mysterious pressure. The morning glowed over the garden like an incoherent rhapsody. It lacked order and thought, and the serious eyes of teachers and jesters would have spurned it. But Halfert Bolin, walking between rows of cold peonies, regarded the morning with harsh approval and spoke.