longer any song, any child's voice, any Annette . . . nothing but a powerful vibration of sunlight. . . . Annette awakened, leaning on her elbow on the window-sill. But at night the tormenting dreams that had disappeared since Marc's birth took up their abode in her. They came in groups of three or four, ceaselessly succeeding one another. Annette rolled from one to another, layer after layer of them. She would get up in the morning fatigued, feverish; she had lived ten nights in one. And she did not want to recall what she had dreamed. Those who saw Annette frequently had observed her anxious brow and her absorbed eyes; they did not understand this sudden change, but they were not disturbed by it; they attributed it to external causes, material difficulties. For Annette these periods of anxiety were a season of deep renewal. She could not do justice to them, for they brought with them the weight of gestation, which was more agonizing than that of maternity. It was a maternity indeed, that of the buried soul. The human being is wrapped up like a seed in the depths of matter, in the amalgam of humus and human loam where the generations have left their debris. The labor of a great life consists in disengaging it. For this childbirth a whole lifetime is necessary, and often the midwife is death. Annette had the secret anguish of the unknown being who was to emerge from her some day and rend her. Overcome by fits of shame, she would shut herself up in a tumultuous retreat, face to face with the immanent Being; and their relations were hostile. The air was charged with electricity; its gusts rose and fell in the immobility. She realized her danger. In vain had her consciousness left in the shadow the thing that disturbed her. "In the shadow" meant in herself, in her own home. And to feel her home peopled from top to bottom with beings whom she did not know was far from reassuring. "All that. . . . I am all that. . . . But what does it want of me? . . . What do I myself desire?" In reply, she said to herself, "You have nothing more to desire. You possess." Her stiffened will turned all the violence of her love upon the child. These continual recurrences of maternal passion were not very fortunate. Abnormal, excessive, unhealthy--(for this passion sprang from an impossible attempt to turn into a path that was not theirs alien and insistent instincts)--they could only end in disappointment. She repelled the child. Marc would not submit to being monopolized in this way. He no longer concealed his ill-will from his mother. He thought her a bore and he told her so in cross little monologues which happily Annette did not hear, but which Sylvie overheard one day. She scolded him for it, bursting out laughing at the same time. Marc, in a corner by the door, was talking to the wall, saying, as he made little impatient gestures, "That woman makes me tired!" XV