They amused themselves by trying to recall under what shapes they had known one another before. Already as human beings? Perhaps. But certainly at that time Pierre was the girl and Luce the lover.... Birds in the air? When she was a small child her mother told Luce that she had been a little wild goose that had fallen down the chimney; ah! she had thoroughly broken her wings!... But where particularly they enjoyed finding themselves again was in the elementary fluid forms that penetrate one another, twist about and untwist like the volutes of a dream or else of smoke: white clouds that dissolve in the gulf of the sky, little waves that play about, the rain on the soil, the dew on the bush, seeds of dandelion that swim at the beck of the air.... But the wind carries them away. Provided it does not begin to blow again and that we shall not lose each other any more for all eternity!... But he decided: "As for me, I believe that we never did quit one another; we were together just as we are now, lying against each other; only, we were asleep and we dreamed dreams. From time to time we awake.... With difficulty.... I feel your breath, your cheek against mine.... One makes a great effort; we bring our mouths together.... One falls back asleep.... Darling, darling, I am here, I hold your hand, don't let me go!... Now it is not quite yet the hour, spring hardly shows the end of his icy nose...." "Like yours," said Luce. "Very soon we shall awake on a fine summer's day...." "We ourselves shall be that fine day of summer," says Luce. "The warm shade of the limetrees, the sun through the branches, the bees that sing...." "The peach on the warm wall and its perfumed pulp...." "The noon spell of the harvesters and their golden sheaves...." "The lazy cattle that chew their cud...." "And at evensong, by the sunset like a flowerset pool, the liquid light that runs across the tops of the fields...." "Yes, we shall be everything," quoth Luce, "everything that is good and sweet to see and to have, to kiss and to eat, to touch and inhale.... What's left over we shall leave to them," she added, pointing to the city and its smoke wreaths. She laughed. Then, kissing her friend, she said: "We have chanted our little duet well. What do you say, my friend Pierrot?" "Yea, verily, Jessica," he replied. "My poor Pierrot," she returned, "we are none too well equipped for this world, where people know how to sing nothing else but the _Marseillaise_!..." "Good enough if they even knew how to sing that!" "We have got off at the wrong station, we left the train too early." "I'm afraid," said Pierre, "that the next station would have been still worse. Can you see us, my darling, in the social fabric of the future--the hive they promise us, where none will have the right to live except for the queen bee's service or for the republic?"