tened?

"You thought you had said all the good-byes there are to say in life.
There is one left, even more awful than the others. You have dragged
yourself over mouldering graves, yet when you arose you found something
to keep you alive. But as yet you are unworthy of this last good-bye:
To survive it, you need a grandeur you don't possess, a more solid
strength than the furtive power you're proud of. You believed you were
pure, and you were quite sure you lived in your entirety. Look!..."

How ashamed I am, O God. What a stranger the woman opposite me is....

* * * * *

At the outset I said to the husband I chose: "I shall cherish your
happiness as much as I cherish my love for you; and if ever your
happiness assumes the features of another woman, that woman shall be
dear to me."

When another woman approached, I knitted my brows and formed a secret
vow to blacken her in his eyes.

* * * * *

He loved me as you love your life, as you sing, as you kiss. And I
reproached him for not leaning over close enough and telling me tender
things over and over again every day. I had plighted my troth; in order
not to take it back, I needed actions, words; to keep it, I had to put
his heart to the proof.

* * * * *

When I came to know another love, my instinct could not rise to the
height of my idea. I did not know how to bring the two men together, nor
did I know how to make the woman who loved him receive the truth.

And I allowed useless people, useless existences to come to me. I saw
them fighting around me like quarrelsome, chattering sparrows around a
tree; I saw them pillage and carry away in their beaks the ripe fruit of
my days. To know how to live is to know how to choose. I did not know.

* * * * *

Everywhere shame. Everywhere in the past, the hell of what I have lost.

These hands capable of everything have done almost nothing. I contented
myself with little and believed in humility.

I silenced nearly every appeal within me. I let regard for others govern
and restrain me. I still feel how the imperious look of an unforgettable
passerby once tore me; the rude superior deprecation in that look was
like a cry rising above the night. Several indifferent persons were
about me, my spirit fixed upon them. Perhaps it was the last of my life
which a stranger mercilessly carried off in the