s passed; I maintained silence,
always, hiding my good qualities, hiding my bad qualities, encountering
only remorse between the two extremes; for it is by remorse that they
are joined together.

Consequently my mind stored up no happening, no deeper or fainter
impression, only remorse. Remorse never left me.

But yes, it did leave me, just now, suddenly, at the bend of the road,
where the bank slopes gently down to the ditch, when I bowed my head to
the thought, "They think me gentle, simple, just like the others; they
say I am cleverer. It is only because I dissemble more than the
others."

At that I raised my eyes.

"What after all does my lying matter to them? Do they want the truth?
No. They spurn it, scourge it, hunt it down. They are not worth trying
to find out the truth for. Enough."

The sunshine seemed to tighten its clutch on the earth and whitewashed
the pathway.

"But it is not this matter of lying that one must bewail; the point is,
there is an essential _something else_. There is--I feel there is--the
true life, my life, and it is this true life that I have betrayed. My
true life is now pushing on, bravely, along the gray stony path.... I
don't know where it is going, nor what it is, since I have never seen it
in anything that I have done, but it must live. If I die for it, what
does it matter? It will live on. It was hidden in my body, it stayed
there ashamed of itself, then came at night to beset me with its sadness
and put me to sleep with the taste of dust and ashes on my lips; and in
the morning, as soon as my eyes opened, was it the light that flooded
over me, painted the walls of my room with flame, and instantly died
away?"

The blue density of the forest, the corrugated, soaring columns of the
trees, high and distinct in their parallel lives, the clear quivering
azure are all around me. Where is their obscure will?

I have come to these things, I have lain down in their midst, I have
watched them. Before these things one no longer lies. And behold, I
find myself.

I see myself as I am.

My heavy hair, flame-colored, which gives out little glints of light
above my forehead, my complexion with the mother-of-pearl coloring of
the full daylight, the violet reflections in my eyes deepened by the
scanty shade of the trees, the firm red line of my lips, and beneath my
light dress, the fleet suppleness encased in my limbs.

Is it possible? I am no longer ashamed to be like this, nor to _k