She is right! When the young woman stands up she takes, in fact, the other's place in the ideal and in the human heart, and makes of the other a returning ghost. It is true. I knew it. Ah, I did not know it was so true! It is too obvious. I cannot deny it. Again a cry of assent rises to my lips and prevents me from saying, "No." I cannot turn away from Marthe's advent, nor as I look at her, from recognizing Marie. I know she has had several little love-affairs. Just now she is alone. She is alone, but she will soon be leaning--yes, phantom or reality, man is not far from her. It is dazzling. Most certainly, I no longer think as I used to do that it is a sort of duty to satisfy the selfish promptings one has, and I have now got an inward veneration for right-doing; but all the same, if that being came to me, I know well that I should become, before all, and in spite of all, an immense cry of delight. Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's no longer anything." She repeats, "You see--I'm nothing any more." Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of a woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer anything." And _I_--I am only he who is present with her just now, and no help whatever is left her to look for from any one. I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence--but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief. "Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!" But she, too, has tried to cling to illusion. I see by the track of her tears, and because I am looking at her--that she has powdered her face to-day and put rouge on her lips, perhaps even on her cheeks, as she did in bygone days, laughing, to set herself off, in spite of me. This woman who tries to keep a good likeness of herself through passing time, to be fixed upon herself, who paints herself, she is, to that extent like what Rembrandt the profound and Titian the bold and exquisite did--make enduring, and save! But this time, a few tears have washed away the fragile, mortal effort. She tries also to delude herself with words, and to discover something in them which would transform her. She asserts, as she did the other morning, "There must be illusion. No, we must not see things as they are." But I see clearly that such words do not exist. Once, when she was looking at me distressfully, she murmured, "_You_--you've no more illusion at all. I pity you!" At that moment, within the space of a flash, she was thinking of me only, and she pities me! She has found something in her grief to give me.