t.
Once more I covered the body with a thick layer of leaves; and trying
again to feed her with a grape, found to my joy that I could open the
mouth a little farther. The grape, indeed, lay in it unheeded, but I
hoped some of the juice might find its way down.

After an hour or two on the couch, she was no longer cold. The warmth of
the brook had interpenetrated her frame--truly it was but a frame!--and
she was warm to the touch;--not, probably, with the warmth of life, but
with a warmth which rendered it more possible, if she were alive, that
she might live. I had read of one in a trance lying motionless for
weeks!

In that cave, day after day, night after night, seven long days and
nights, I sat or lay, now waking now sleeping, but always watching.
Every morning I went out and bathed in the hot stream, and every morning
felt thereupon as if I had eaten and drunk--which experience gave me
courage to lay her in it also every day. Once as I did so, a shadow of
discoloration on her left side gave me a terrible shock, but the next
morning it had vanished, and I continued the treatment--every morning,
after her bath, putting a fresh grape in her mouth.

I too ate of the grapes and other berries I found in the forest; but I
believed that, with my daily bath in that river, I could have done very
well without eating at all.

Every time I slept, I dreamed of finding a wounded angel, who, unable to
fly, remained with me until at last she loved me and would not leave me;
and every time I woke, it was to see, instead of an angel-visage with
lustrous eyes, the white, motionless, wasted face upon the couch. But
Adam himself, when first he saw her asleep, could not have looked more
anxiously for Eve's awaking than I watched for this woman's. Adam knew
nothing of himself, perhaps nothing of his need of another self; I, an
alien from my fellows, had learned to love what I had lost! Were this
one wasted shred of womanhood to disappear, I should have nothing in me
but a consuming hunger after life! I forgot even the Little Ones: things
were not amiss with them! here lay what might wake and be a woman! might
actually open eyes, and look out of them upon me!

Now first I knew what solitude meant--now that I gazed on one who
neither saw nor heard, neither moved nor spoke. I saw now that a man
alone is but a being that may become a man--that he is but a need, and
therefore a possibility. To be enough for himself, a being must be
an et