I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of
leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to
give him. There was a suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his
expression.

"No," she said, "you are not going to love me always. You are going to
leave me. But I regret nothing. I never will regret anything.
Afterwards, when I return from--/this/--for good, to the great sorrow
that will never leave me again, I shall say, 'I have had a lover,' and
I shall come out from my nothingness to be happy for a moment."

He did not want to answer. He could not answer any more. He
stammered:

"Why do you doubt me?"

But they turned their eyes toward the window. They were afraid, they
were cold. They looked down at the space between the two houses and
saw a vague remnant of twilight slip away like a ship of glory.

It seemed to me that the window beside them entered the scene. They
gazed at it, dim, immense, blotting out everything around it. After
the brief interval of sinful passion, they were overwhelmed as if,
looking at the stainless azure of the window, they had seen a vision.
Then their eyes met.

"See, we stay here," she said, "looking at each other like two
miserable curs."

They separated. He seated himself on a chair, a sorry figure in the
dusk.

His mouth was open, his face was contracted. His eyes and his jaw were
self-condemnatory. You expected that in a few moments he would become
emaciated, and you would see the eternal skeleton.

And at last both were alike in their setting, made so as much by their
misery as by their human form. The night swallowed them up. I no
longer saw them.

. . . . .

Then, where is God, where is God? Why does He not intervene in this
frightful, regular crisis? Why does He not prevent, by a miracle, that
fearful miracle by which one who is adored suddenly or gradually comes
to be hated? Why does he not preserve man from having to mourn the
loss of all his dreams? Why does he not preserve him from the distress
of that sensuousness which flowers in his flesh and falls back on him
again like spittle?

Perhaps because I am a man like the man in the room, like all other
men, perhaps because what is bestial engrosses my attention now, I am
utterly terrified by the invincible recoil of the flesh.

"It is everything in the world," he had said. "It is nothing," he had
also said, but later. The echo of those two cries