They come and go in all directions. They talk together. Then they drift away. A little empty street runs down between two white walls. A group passes and moves away, leaving behind it a man and woman who stop suddenly, glance around them and kiss each other fervently. And we see, underneath the veil in which the woman's forehead is shrouded, two great, black eyes whose lids flutter like wings, eyes which open, close, laugh and weep. Thus we go back through the ages and we understand that those who, gazing down upon the earth, have taken these successive pictures wish, in displaying them to us, to show us the act, for-ever youthful and eternally renewed, of that universal love of which they proclaim themselves, like us, to be the slaves and the zealous worshippers. They too are governed and exalted by the same law, though perhaps not expressed in them by the intoxication of a like caress. The same impulse sweeps them along. But do they know the adorable union of the lips? Other couples passed. Other periods were reviewed. Other civilizations appeared to us. We saw the kiss of an Egyptian peasant and a young girl; and that exchanged high up in a hanging garden of Babylon between a princess and a priest; and that which transfigured to such a degree as to make them almost human two unspeakable beings squatting at the door of a prehistoric cave; and more kisses and yet more. They were brief visions, some of which were indistinct and faded, like the colours of an ancient fresco, but yet searching and potent, because of the meaning which they assumed, full at the same time of poetry and brutal reality, of violence and serene loveliness. And always the woman's eyes were the centre, the purpose, as it were the justification of the pictures. Oh, the smiles and the tears, the gladness and the despair and the exquisite rapture of all those eyes! How our friends up aloft must also have felt all the charm of them, thus to dedicate them to us! How they must have felt and perhaps regretted all the difference between those eyes of ecstasy and enchantment and their own eyes, so gloomy and void of all expression! There was such sweetness in those women's eyes, such grace, such ingenuousness, such adorable perfidy, such distress and such seductiveness, such triumphant joy, such grateful humility . . . and such love, when they offered their submissive lips to the man! * * * * * I was unable to see the end of those pictures. There was a movement round about me in the midst of the crowd, which was beside itself with painful excitement; and I found myself next to a woman in mourning, whose face was hidden beneath her veils.