"Suffering--important word! It leads us to the heart of reality. Human suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it contains. 'I, with all my suffering!' It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain? "And the woman said, 'My God, I do not wish for heaven!'" "Well, then," said Amy, trembling, "it follows that we can be miserable in paradise." "Paradise is life," said the poet. Amy was silent and remained with her head lifted, comprehending at last that the whole poem was simply a reply to her question and that he had revived in her soul a loftier and a juster thought. "Life is exalted to perfection as it ends," the poet went on. "'It is beautiful to reach the end of one's days,' said the lover. 'It is in this way that we have lived paradise.' "There is the truth," the poet concluded. "It does not wipe out death. It does not diminish space, nor halt time. But it makes us what we are in essential. Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. 'Just as I am!' Remember that. We are a great mixture. We are more than we believe. Who knows what we are?" On the woman's face, which the terror of death had rigidly contracted, a smile dawned. She asked with childish dignity: "Why did you not tell me this right away when I asked you?" "You would not have understood me then. You had run your dream of distress into a blind alley. I had to take the truth along a different way so as to present it to you anew." . . . . . After that they fell silent. For a fraction of time they had come as close to each other as human beings can come down here below--because of their august assent to the lofty truth, to the arduous truth (for it is hard to understand that happiness is at the same time happy and unhappy). She believed him, however, she, the rebel, she, the unbeliever, to whom he had given a true heart to touch. CHAPTER VIII The window was wide open. In the dusty rays of the sunset I saw three people with their backs to the long reddish-brown beams of light. An old man, with a care-worn, exhausted appearance and a face furrowed with wrinkles, seated in the armchair near the window. A tall young woman with very fair hair and the face of a madonna. And, a little apart, a woman who was pregnant.