ge sleeves there are the arms of a mother,
even perhaps of a woman in love; the huge pancake on the nape of her
neck shows she has long shining hair silky to the touch; and what
tenderness in the depth of her eyes which dart glances in our direction.
If she dared, what sweetness....

She came to speak to us from a platform for the purpose of conveying her
idea and a little of her soul, unaware that a valiant soul is a visible
soul. The only means we have of showing our souls, sharing them and
giving them freedom, are the ordinary means--our actions, the bare flesh
of our lips, the sincere tears of our eyes, our bodies which encase our
souls, our smiles which beautify our souls, and our voices.

This woman's soul is a strained voice, but how marvellous. The rows in
the audience remain stationary, each head staying fixed in the position
it held at the first word she uttered.

The women's horrid cares, their marketing, their husbands, their
children, their dishwashing, their difficulty in making ends meet, all
the everyday trifles that weigh on women and enslave them, are driven
far away. The pale blonde with faded eyes beside Eva probably made the
same O of her mouth when she spelled out her letters as a child. The old
woman nodding "Yes, yes"--the two plumes in her bonnet respond "Yes,
yes"--has forgotten her stupid drudgery.

They are all stamped with a sort of pathetic imprint; love is their
element, their strength, their medium. They listen with love and
understand through love. Love gives them this serious, fixed
attentiveness.

The woman with the burning insignia of her stove on her fiery cheeks has
lost all traces of worry except for the scolding expression of the
mother whom you imagine with a horde of children jumping round her like
little rabbits. And the thin girl with the dusky gaze--we've all seen
her kneeling in the shadow of a confessional mumbling her sins with her
mouth glued to a wooden grating from the other side of which comes the
warm breath of a man without a face--what ardor she, too, is capable of!

Instead of the voice of the speaker on the platform it is the women's
outcries that I hear.

These women have been imprisoned by themselves, hampered by their own
lives, and what lives! what a miserable heap of desires and troubles in
the face of the immense thing which gathers all beings together and
makes them resemble one another, the thing unanimous and intangible that
I hardly see. I don't