She is silent. She is seeking the supreme complaint; she is trying to find what there is which is more torturing and more simple; and she stammers--"The truth." The truth is that the love of mankind is a single season among so many others. The truth is that we have within us something much more mortal than we are, and that it is this, all the same, which is all-important. Therefore we survive very much longer than we live. There are things we think we know and which yet are secrets. Do we really know what we believe? We believe in miracles. We make great efforts to struggle, to go mad. We should like to let all our good deserts be seen. We fancy that we are exceptions and that something supernatural is going to come along. But the quiet peace of the truth fixes us. The impossible becomes again the impossible. We are as silent as silence itself. We stayed lonely on the seat until evening. Our hands and faces shone like gleams of storm in the entombment of the calm and the mist. We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these few hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but close by--so close--are phantoms! Then bedtime comes. She is sleeping in the little bedroom opposite mine across the landing, less fine than mine and smaller, hung with an old and faded paper, where the patterned flowers are only an irregular relief, with traces here and there of powder, of colored dust and ashes. We are going to separate on the landing. To-day is not the first time like that! but to-day we are feeling this great rending which is not one. She has begun to undress. She has taken off her blouse. I see her neck and her breasts, a little less firm than before, through her chemise; and half tumbling on to the nape of her neck, the fair hair which once magnificently flamed on her like a fire of straw. She only says, "It's better to be a man than a woman." Then she replies to my silence, "You see, we don't know what to say, now." In the angle of the narrow doorway she spoke with a kind of immensity.