“The Wall Opposite” is a study of human tendencies. A mother, a daughter, and an aged aunt are compelled by reverses to let out those rooms of their apartments that faced out upon the street, but their own little back suite had a cozy and intimate air. Its windows overlooked a court whose walls were covered with honeysuckle and roses. One day they were told that in the court a high wall was to be built which would steal away the air and hide the sun. They had no money wherewith to buy off the project, so in one short month a grayish-white wall--almost like a twilight sky of November--shut them in. Long they had looked for an inheritance which would some day come to them. Then they would buy the house and tear down that wall--and always the old aunt used to pray that she might live to see that day. But the bequest was long in coming. One day a young man came, introduced by friends, and for a while he sat at the table of these “three ladies without fortune.” He was handsome and high-spirited, and the young girl loved him, but she was poor, and for lack of sunlight the color had begun to fade from her cheeks. So he went away and never returned. Twenty years passed--the aunt had died, the mother had grown gray, and the daughter was now past forty. Then at last the inheritance came. They sent away their lodgers, but somehow the two women remained in the little back _salon_. They had come to love it. At last the wall which for twenty years they had endured would be torn down. At twilight of the second day the wall was razed, but the mother and daughter sitting at their table were bewildered at seeing so clearly. The wall was gone--they had the light, the roses and vines! For twenty years they had hoped for this happiness, yet now--they were uneasy, something seemed to have gone wrong. A sort of melancholy had come over them. The mother, looking into her daughter’s eyes, saw tears. “It can be built up again,” she says. “It seems to me they can try, can they not, to make it the same again?” “I, too, thought of that,” replied the daughter. “But no, don’t you see? _It would never be the same!_” And this was the secret: more than the power of custom in her Life was the fact that the wall had been the background of a picture--the face of a young man which she had watched through one short spring-time. This is one of Loti’s few technically perfect short-stories. His sketchy, rambling, loosely-plotted “novels” and travel-reflections differ greatly in manner from the compact story of plot, but his writings do abound in easily separable fragments, or episodes--as to which a word must now be set down, before we take up the plot and the final scenes of Loti’s greatest work, _Pecheur d’Islande_.