owers and my whole being stir. He draws me to him and holds
without daring to embrace me, small, panting, fainting away....

* * * * *

The pile has been swallowed up, the Broad Walk has turned black, the
beautiful moment has fled through my fault; we have only a few steps
farther to go. If I have nothing to give him, may he at least share with
me the one idea I still retain.

This idea is the strange knowledge I have of my body, but of a body no
longer mine, so lucid has it become, full of resonances, coursing blood,
warmth and appeal ... a body of mysterious flesh and tense limbs, as
bright as a torch, as sensitive as a soul ... a body I want to give
him--my body and my arms.

XX

"No, don't get up, stay where you are; it is I.

"You told me you were not going to work this evening, so I came. I want
to talk to you.

"I am going to sit beside you, if you don't mind, on the cushion on the
floor under the window, where I like to sit when it is as light as it is
now.

"I hesitate, not because it's hard to say. On the contrary, it's too
simple, and things too simple are beyond words to express.

"I really have nothing to tell you. You understood. You know. But it is
right for me to come and right that the confession I want to make should
revert to our love, for it has to do with our love.

"How you look at me.... Your eyes probe to the depths.... Yes. That is
it.... You do see, don't you? I love him.

"Perhaps the confession, which is so long, so long in beginning and has
weighed so heavily, is already finished?... No. Since my eyes are
overflowing, I have not yet made it. Well, listen, I have no idea any
more of what I am going to tell you, but don't interrupt, let me say
everything....

"Oh, I wanted to speak in orderly sequence, and I promised myself I
should not be moved but would talk to you quite simply. When I came in,
I felt I was growing and rising. I heard my own words stirring like live
things.... But they are trivial; they hurt me so I wish I could find
others.

"To think that here at this window we have so often talked of love, not
of our love, but of all love. You remember? You used to say--I think it
was you: 'What is beautiful is not the face you love so dearly, it is
the need to love it dearly. What matters is not the delirium in which
two people lose themselves, but the truth they discover.' And when you
and I evoked those two rays of light which are one,