d, in a voice tremulous and rather solemn as if he were
making a confession. "I once imagined two beings who were at the end
of their life, and were recalling all they had suffered."

"A poem!" she said, discouraged.

"Yes," he said, "one of those which might be so beautiful."

It was remarkable to see how animated he became. For the first time he
appeared sincere--when abandoning the living example of their own
destiny for the fiction of his imagination. In referring to his poem,
he had trembled. You felt he was becoming his genuine self and that he
had faith. She raised her head to listen, moved by her tenacious need
of hearing something, though she had no confidence in it.

"The man and the woman are believers," he began. "They are at the end
of their life, and they are happy to die for the reasons that one is
sad to live. They are a kind of Adam and Eve who dream of the paradise
to which they are going to return. The paradise of purity. Paradise
is light. Life on earth is obscurity. That is the motif of the song I
have sketched, the light that they desire, the shadow that they are."

"Like us," said Amy.

He told of the life of the man and the woman of his poem. Amy listened
to him, and accepted what he was saying. Once she put her hands on her
heart and said, "Poor people!" Then she got a little excited. She
felt he was going too far. She did not wish so much darkness, maybe
because she was tired or because the picture when painted by some one
else seemed exaggerated.

Dream and reality here coincided. The woman of the poem also protested
at this point.

I was carried away by the poet's voice, as he recited, swaying
slightly, in the spell of the harmony of his own dream:

"At the close of a life of pain and suffering the woman still looked
ahead with the curiosity she had when she entered life. Eve ended as
she had begun. All her subtle eager woman's soul climbed toward the
secret as if it were a kind of kiss on the lips of her life. She
wanted to be happy."

Amy was now more interested in her companion's words. The curse of the
lovers in the poem, sister to the curse she felt upon herself, gave her
confidence. But her personality seemed to be shrinking. A few moments
before she had dominated everything. Now she was listening, waiting,
absorbed.

"The lover reproached the woman for contradicting herself in claiming
earthly and celestial happiness at the same time. She answered