ch
he listened to from so far away, oh, so far away! in a bored and mocking
demi-torpidity. Plunged in their discussions, the others were a long
while in remarking his muteness. But at last Saisset, accustomed to find
in Pierre an echo of his verbal bolshevisms, was astonished at failing
to hear it reverberate any more and put the question to him.

Pierre waked up in a hurry, reddened, smiled and asked:

"What were you talking about?"

They were most indignant.

"Why, you haven't been listening to anything!"

"What, then, were you brooding about?" asked Naude.

A little confused, a little impertinent, Pierre replied:

"About the springtide. It has come back all right without your
permission. It will clear out without our help."

All of them crushed him with their disdain. Naude taunted him as a
"poet." And Jacques See as a _poseur_.

Puget alone fixed his eyes on him with curiosity and irony in them, his
wrinkled eyes with their cold pupils.

"Flying ant!"

"What?" questioned Pierre, rather amused.

"Beware of the wings!" said Puget. "It's the nuptial flight. It only
lasts one hour."

"Life does not last much more," said Pierre.

* * * * *

DURING Passion Week they saw one another every day. Pierre went to see
Luce in her isolated house. The thin and hungry garden was waking up.
They passed the afternoon there. They felt now an antipathy toward Paris
and the crowd, against life also. At certain moments even, a moral
paralysis kept them silent, immovable, one close to the other, without a
wish to stir. A strange feeling was at work in both of them. They were
afraid! Fear--in the measure that the day approached when they should
give themselves the one to the other--fear through excess of love,
through the purification of soul which the ugly things, the cruelties,
the shameful facts of life frightened, and which, in an intoxication of
passion and melancholy, dreamed of being delivered from it all.... They
said nothing about it to each other.

The most of their time they passed in babbling gently about their
future lodgings, their work in common, their little household. They
arranged in advance, down to the smallest item of their installation,
the furniture, the wall papers, the spot for each object. A true woman,
the evocation of these tender nothings, intimate and familiar images of
daily life, moved Luce sometimes to tears. They tasted the exquisite
small joys of the hearth of the future.... Th