Once at home, Odette thought more about Clotilde's conversation than about the coming meeting with the blinded man, which she dreaded. On the other side of the thin partition of her little drawing-room, her neighbor, the musician, who was sometimes reinforced by a 'cellist, was filling all space with enamoured, passionate, and agitating sounds, enough to rend the heart. Love, love, everywhere and always love! For the first time in her life Odette, who adored love, who but now had been delighting in talking freely of love, who even admitted the justice of some of Clotilde's assertions on the superlatively beneficent office of love, Odette felt that in thinking of love and talking of love with her friend she had lost tone, and now she had only one thought, heard only the one voice from beyond the tomb. "When I am talking with my friend," she said to herself, "I seem to be taking part in what is said, or is laughed at; yes, but I take part in it like the dead to whom it is given to perceive earthly things once more. The war, when it robbed me of my Jean, crushed the vitality of my body. My heart has become forever insensible. I am carried along in the whirlwind of present events like the threshed straw which might float above the standing harvest, thinking to recognize in it stalks like itself, without realizing that the iron has cut it off, separated it forever from the earth." The moaning of the violoncello, the influence of the music, gave a sort of lyric inclination to her usually modest thought and contributed to increase her agitation. "The times are so hard," she continued, "that I have not had, for two years, the slight consolation of talking with any one of my love-sorrow. I could hope to do so with one alone, because her love is, so to speak, apart from the war. But when she speaks to me of love I perceive that her idea of love is not mine, or is no longer mine. The love that I bear within me is no longer accessible to any human creature!" The musician in the next room took up, as usual, her favorite _Nocturne_, accompanying it with her voice, wordlessly, until the grand, inspired utterance of desolation, thrice repeated, enwrapped the hearer like the long dark locks of night itself. Then Odette, solitary amidst the pictures of her well-beloved, fell into a long fit of weeping, as she had so often done before. XXVI