One is ashamed to belong to mankind."

Pierre trembled.

"Yes," said he.

And after a silence, bending over, he said very low:

"Forgive me!"

Luce sprang up impetuously, threw herself on Pierre's neck, repeating:

"Forgive me!"

And their mouths found each other.

The two children felt the need of consoling one another, both of them.
Without saying it aloud they were thinking:

"Luckily we are going to die! The most frightful thing would be to
become one of those men who are proud of being man--to destroy, to
render vile...."

Lips touching lips, eyelashes brushing eyelashes, they plunged their
gaze one in the other, smiling and with a tender pity. They did not tire
of that divine sentiment which is the purest form of love. At last they
tore themselves from their contemplation and Luce, with eyes again
serene, perceived once more the gentle hue of the sky, the sweetness of
the renewing trees and the breath of flowers.

"How lovely it all is!" she exclaimed.

She was thinking:

"Why are things so beautiful? And we so poor, so mediocre, so ugly!
(unless it be you, my love, unless it be you!) ..."

She gazed at Pierre again:

"Pshaw! What are others to me?"

And with the magnificent illogicality of love she burst out laughing,
sprang up with a leap, rushed into the wood and cried: "Catch me, catch
me!"

They played like two children all the rest of the day. And when they
were very tired they returned with slow steps toward the valley filled
like a basket with the sheaves of the setting sun. Everything they
savored seemed new to them--with one heart for two, with two bodies for
one.

* * * * *

THEY were five friends about the same age, met together at the house of
one of them, five young comrades at their studies whom a certain
conformity of mind and a first sorting out of opinions had grouped
together apart from the rest. And yet no two of them who thought the
same way. Beneath the pretended unanimity of forty millions of Frenchmen
there are forty million brains that keep right to themselves. Thought in
France is like the country, a state composed of small properties. From
one bit of farm to the other the five friends tried to exchange their
ideas across the hedge. But they did that only to affirm themselves more
imperatively in their several opinions, each for himself. Each one, for
that matter, liberal in mind, and, if not all of them republicans, all
foes of intellectual or social rea