he shuffling of feet.

I am dreaming. Impossible that a gathering of human beings should be
such an outrage on life, such a parody of it. When living persons come
together and have attired themselves beautifully, it is for the
interchange of what is best in them, not for the spilling of gall and
the raising of a hubbub. I must be dreaming.

Little groups were coming back; women's laughter cut the curdled air
like sharp lashes.

* * * * *

Again I made a painful effort and rose. With the looks of the women
riddling me and paralyzed by the men's attention, I crossed the room
driven by a force that operated for me. I found myself beside him.

* * * * *

He raised his eyes slowly. Did he smile? I no longer know. But he
looked--as I must have looked--as though he were gazing into light.

XVIII

I have a new friend.

A friend.... When I see him, it is like a revision of all I am, a kind
of unusual sincerity that urges me on, amplifies me, and carries me
toward him.

When he is away, I have the impression of having discovered a treasure
within myself from which I draw in deep draughts....

And also of hymns striking up beneath my tread.

XIX

"Why? Yes, tell me why you squeezed my hand so hard?"

I lean towards him, my head touches his chest. He is enraptured,
overwhelmed, and as smiling as the night when it is about to pass.

He did not answer.

A silky wind blows down from a sheltering eminence and carves his face
and makes me cling to him. Are we on the borders of the true silence,
the ultimate silence in which human beings find themselves face to face?
"You! You!"

A terraced garden. If this were another evening, I should be discovering
in detail how beautiful the garden is. Each walk opens up a paradise,
cool and secret as a spring, and the pebbles shine like glowworms.
Borders of irises with violet fragrance dissolving among their stems, a
profusion of spreading boughs, and near our bench a thicket from which
at intervals darts the straight streak of a gray-bird's flight. Below us
in the distant semi-circle across the fading daylight the sparkling
apparition of a group of houses lighting up.

The sight of all this beauty fills me with such a glow--almost hurts
me--because I feel _he_ is looking at me.... He says: "Your shining
curly hair, your broad, clear forehead, your mouth, your eyes."
Mentioned in his quivering passionate voice m