even his
brother--especially not his brother.

He no longer thought about the vain respect of public opinion. He would
have been glad that all the world should accuse his mother if only he,
he alone, knew her to be innocent! How could he bear to live with her
every day, believing as he looked at her that his brother was the child
of a stranger's love?

And how calm and serene she was, nevertheless, how sure of herself she
always seemed! Was it possible that such a woman as she, pure of soul
and upright in heart, should fall, dragged astray by passion, and
yet nothing ever appear afterward of her remorse and the stings of a
troubled conscience? Ah, but remorse must have tortured her, long ago in
the earlier days, and then have faded out, as everything fades. She
had surely bewailed her sin, and then, little by little, had almost
forgotten it. Have not all women, all, this fault of prodigious
forgetfulness which enables them, after a few years, hardly to recognise
the man to whose kisses they have given their lips? The kiss strikes
like a thunderbolt, the love passes away like a storm, and then life,
like the sky, is calm once more, and begins again as it was before. Do
we ever remember a cloud?

Pierre could no longer endure to stay in the room! This house, his
father's house, crushed him. He felt the roof weigh on his head, and the
walls suffocate him. And as he was very thirsty he lighted his candle to
go to drink a glass of fresh water from the filter in the kitchen.

He went down the two flights of stairs; then, as he was coming up again
with the water-bottle filled, he sat down, in his night-shirt, on a step
of the stairs where there was a draught, and drank, without a tumbler,
in long pulls like a runner who is out of breath. When he ceased to
move the silence of the house touched his feelings; then, one by one,
he could distinguish the faintest sounds. First there was the ticking of
the clock in the dining-room which seemed to grow louder every second.
Then he heard another snore, an old man's snore, short, laboured, and
hard, his father beyond doubt; and he writhed at the idea, as if it had
but this moment sprung upon him, that these two men, sleeping under the
same room--father and son--were nothing to each other! Not a tie, not
the very slightest, bound them together, and they did not know it!
They spoke to each other affectionately, they embraced each other, they
rejoiced and lamented together over the sam