Yes, epilepsy, a mental disease, a pain. A slow, sweet pain, bite, and it goes deeper and becomes sharper. And then, slowly, sunshine,--not our sunshine, not crystalline, bluish and soft, coming through the glass bricks. No, a wild sunshine, rushing and burning, tearing everything into small bits.... The Number at my left glanced at me and chuckled. I don't know why but I remember exactly how a microscopic saliva bubble appeared on his lips and burst. That bubble brought me back to myself. I was again I. Like all the other Numbers I heard now only the senseless, disorderly cracking of the chords. I laughed; I felt so light and simple. The gifted phono-lecturer represented to us only too well that wild epoch. And that was all. With what a joy I listened afterward to our contemporary music. It was demonstrated to us at the end of the lecture for the sake of contrast. Crystalline, chromatic scales converging and diverging into endless series; and synthetic harmony of the formulae of Taylor and McLauren, wholesome, square and massive like the "trousers of Pythagoras." Sad melodies dying away in waving movements. The beautiful texture of the spectrum of planets, dissected by Frauenhofer lines ... what magnificent, what perfect regularity! How pitiful the wilful music of the ancients, not limited except by the scope of their wild imaginations! As usual in good order, four abreast, all of us left the auditorium. The familiar double-curved figure passed swiftly by. I respectfully bowed. Dear O- was to come in an hour. I felt agitated,--agreeably and usefully. Home at last! I rushed to the house-office, handed over to the controller on duty my pink ticket and received a certificate permitting the use of the curtains. This right exists in our State only for the sexual days. Normally we live surrounded by transparent walls which seem to be knitted of sparkling air; we live beneath the eye of everyone, always bathed in light. We have nothing to conceal from one another; besides, this mode of living makes the difficult and exalted task of the Guardians much easier. Without it many bad things might happen. It is possible that the strange opaque dwellings of the ancients were responsible for their pitiful cellish psychology. "My (_sic!_) home is my fortress!" How did they manage to think of such things? At twenty-two o'clock I lowered the curtain and at the same second O- came in smiling, slightly out of breath. She extended to me her rosy lips and her pink ticket. I tore off the stub but I could not tear myself away from the rosy lips up to the last moment,--twenty-two-fifteen. Then I showed her my diary and I talked; I think I talked very well on the beauty of a square, a cube, a straight line. At first she listened so charmingly, she was so rosy, when suddenly a tear appeared in her blue eyes, then another, and a third fell straight on the open page (page 7). The ink blurred; well, I shall have to copy it again. "My dear O-, if only you, if...."