with this scene, these crabbed
shops, hostile promenaders, and square of bourgeoning; he had walked on
these cobblestones; and at the edge of the town was his little summer
villa. The idea went round and round, very fast; and I was weak; so I
clutched at it for support.

* * * * *

Another veiled woman in black....

That figure tending to heaviness but graceful and in the very mould of
femininity is not unfamiliar. I have seen the woman before. You can
tell from a distance that she wears the mark of the widow, a hood-like
hat faced with white.

She too;...

I am interested in her. In the country you are interested in everybody
you meet.

Who is she, I wonder. She seems to be about forty, but neither her hair
nor her cheeks have lost their freshness. Who....

My heart bursts, alarm comes rushing, misfortune approaches.... She
walks toward me--she is only a few feet away.... If she would only
stop ... it is she ... his wife!

* * * * *

In the time it takes to walk only a few feet you can undergo the acutest
agony. I held my breath and for a second time felt death strike me with
its thunderbolt. I had time to become a widow too.

She advanced terribly: it was death advancing along the sidewalk. I felt
I must detain and implore her. With jaws set I restrained a great
convulsive outcry and flung myself in her way.... My lips gave a sort of
cluck.... She fixed her eyes straight ahead and turned away deliberately
as if from a drunken beggar.

I looked and looked after her....

* * * * *

She departs--forever--her skirt grazing the ground. Her veil carries
away the remnant of my joy, leaving me there stupefied and convulsed,
alone under the sun. She departs....

My God!...

XI

My son is growing up.

He has reddish-brown ringlets, his cheeks are vermilion, the blue of his
eyes radiates seraphic calm. He is probably going to be very handsome.
Often people stop me on the street to tell me how lovely he is, and for
a moment I feel some pride.

He is beginning to show human traits; he talks, he expresses a desire to
touch and possess things, and likes to listen to stories, which used to
make no appeal: "And then, Mamma? Tell me, what next?..." I always begin
by kissing him.

My heart has grown with him. I have just begun to feel that his
existence is rooted in my own existence. What welds me to him are not
on