She walked on. The summer was pouring its splendid waves over the city. The blue gaze of the sky bathed the tops of the houses. . . . How good it would have been to be far away from the city in the fields! . . . But that was more than she could ask for: Annette did not have the means to leave Paris. No doubt Marc would be able to go off for a few weeks with his aunt to some beach in Normandy. But Annette would not go; her pride would not allow her to be a charge on her sister. Besides, ever since the days when she had seen them with her father, she had felt an aversion for summer-resorts, with all their bored people, those flirtations of the idle and the curious. She would stay at home alone. She did not mind this. She carried within herself the sea and the sky, the sunsets behind the hills, the milky fogs, the fields stretching out under the shroud of moonlight, the calm death of the nights. In the August afternoon, breathing the warm air, amid the uproar of the streets and the flood of human beings, Annette crossed Paris with the quick, sure step, the light, rhythmical step of other days, noting everything as she passed and yet very far away. . . . In the great, dusty street, shaken by the wheels of the heavy autobusses, she was wandering in her thought under the vaults of the forest in that Burgundian countryside where she had spent her happy childhood, and her nostrils caught the odor of bark and moss. She was walking over the fallen autumn leaves. A rain-laden wind swept through the stripped branches, brushing her cheek with its damp wing; a bird's song flowed magically through the silence; the rain-laden wind passed her. . . . Through these woods the young Annette passed also with her weeping lover, and there was the hawthorne hedge, there were the bees about the abandoned house. . . . Joys and sorrows. . . . So far away! She smiled at her own youthful image to which suffering was still so new. . . . "Wait, my poor Annette, you are only at the beginning. . . ." "Do you regret nothing?" "Nothing!" "Neither what you have done nor what you have failed to do?" "Nothing, deceitful spirit! Were you trying to spy out my regrets? You will find that your labor is lost! I accept everything, everything I have had and everything I have not had, my whole lot, wise and foolish. Everything has been as it should have been, the wise and the foolish. One makes mistakes: that is life. But it is never quite a mistake to have loved. Although age is overtaking me, my heart, at least, has no wrinkles. And although it has suffered, it is happy to have loved." And her grateful mind turned, with a smile, to those whom she had loved.