ly
more taciturn expression, too. My solitude would account for this. Women
are not sufficiently alive to the fact that one should live alone,
depart alone, and return alone, and that there is no one outside one's
self. No one. In going to meet love again, I who have been twice widowed
and have my child to make me feel more isolated, shall find nothing but
another solitude. To be sure, there will be kisses, meetings, a symphony
of voices. Yet in spite of everything to know you're alone, all the
time....

All the time....

If I had reached this secure kingdom through my own power I should be
very proud. But I don't deserve the credit. My dead lovers gave me this
awful superhuman gift. For there comes a moment when you have taken from
some one else everything there was to be taken. Without his noticing he
becomes useless, he must disappear. Who resigns himself to this?

My lovers bestowed upon me the love I was capable of, attentive and
complete, they bestowed upon me the intelligence of my blood, my tears
and my words.... And then they gave me up. They performed this supreme
deed.

And now when enlarged by love I desire love again, I give it its place.
Love is not the essential thing. I have often said: "Life, my life." The
phrase has assumed the shape of my lips because it says the essential
thing. Love, after all is nothing but the most beautiful moment.

I summon all the moments of my life. Even the least thrilling cling just
as deeply by roots of flesh.

Life wishes to become what it never has been: It is ready, it is
empty.... Until to-night human words filled it saying:

"Nothing changes here below; nothing can possibly change: love goes on
from age to age, death was and will be, life is forever the same, and
man is always man." To express this the word "eternal" has been
invented.

I do not know. I came, I, a woman, and like every other creature, I too
began by loving. Life was _not_ the same, I swear it was not the same.
Life had a different taste, I shouldered it differently, and my death,
while resembling other deaths, does not exist by the same idea.

I am; everything is changed.

And even if I had never lived, other women are ready to change the
earth. You can't tell yet what the women of my generation are capable
of. They themselves don't know altogether.

The memory of what they have always been told weighs upon them. Man is a
fierce, greedy lover. With bloodshot eyes like a blind man, he has