e wants to find me in
misfortune, but it's as though I have passed over into an enemy's camp.

She has come because she is in trouble. I do my best. I hold her hands
in mine and try to trace the ravages of grief on her faun face because
she keeps saying: "I'm so miserable." She must be suffering. But I
cannot get myself to be moved.

This is her story. Her lover has betrayed her, she is sure of it. In
tidying his drawers she found letters from a woman referring to a recent
rendezvous. She thought she'd die when she read them.... Still I am
unmoved. She warms up to her theme. At breakfast, then and there, a
terrible scene; they fly at each other.... Disgust seizes me.... To show
my interest and stimulate my pity, I ask some questions. "So you had an
explanation and could come to an understanding?" She snatches her hands
away and draws back. "Aren't you listening?"

To come to an understanding! That would be too easy. They rushed at each
other at the first pretext, each resorting to shifts and dodges and
keeping silent as to the real issue, though recognizing the other's
grievance. "He beat me."

She closes her beautiful victimized eyes. She has displayed the seven
wounds of her heart; and the least she expects is the shelter of my
breast and the succor of my arms....

"But it would be so simple to tell each other the truth and try to
understand each other...."

She keeps her flexible panther-like body from bounding up. "The truth!
what truth? Do you think love is so simple? He has deceived me. That's
the only truth I need to know." She gives herself up to tears, and her
clear eyes turn into two bloodshot orbs.

Should I tell her that I am insensible to such despair, and her love is
merely a mistake proceeding from books, it really isn't love? Should I
tell her that love is logical and simple at bottom, and is less in its
transports than in the gentleness it conveys? Should I tell her that men
like change more than women and for a man to snatch at a passing
temptation does not mean that he is trying to reach the love he prefers?
Should I?

She anticipates me. "I understand, I understand, you are not in love.
Poor little thing, you'll see when you love!" She sends her prophetic
look around the orderly room and the, to her, inconceivable quiet. What
polite excuse can she find for getting away quickly? She came a long way
to meet a real sister in love. We ought to have groaned together over
the common enemy who is