re fused.
She has understood, above all, that, to contain, glorify and keep love,
we need all the energy of our respective personalities and all the
benefit of our dissimilarity!

Rose was silent.

I lay on the grass, with my arms outstretched and my eyes fixed on the
sky; and the breeze sent my hair playing over my lips. For a long while
afterwards, my thoughts continued to wander amid the fairest things in
the world.

CHAPTER XII

1

It is typical autumn weather, a dull, dark day which seems never to have
fully dawned. Beneath the burden of the weary, oppressive clouds, the
grass is greener and the roads more distinct. The light seems to rise to
the sky instead of falling from it.

I have been in the kitchen-garden for an hour. There all the plants are
beaten down by the wind and the rain; the asparagus-fronds lie across
the paths like tangled hair; but the broad-bottomed cabbages are a joy
to the eye, with their air of comfortable middle-class prosperity.
Looking at their closely enfolded hearts, I seemed to recover the
illusion of my childhood, of the days when my eyes pictured mystery in
their depths....

How amazed we are when one of our senses happens to receive a sudden
impression, in the same way as when we were children! We behold the same
object simultaneously in the present and the past; and between those two
points, identical and yet different to our eyes, our memory tries to
stretch a thread that can help it to follow the thousand and one
intermediate transformations which have led us from the false to the
true, from the wonderful to the simple, from dreams to reality. We
should, no doubt, discover here, in the subtle history of our sensations
and the different ways in which we received them, the gradual forming of
our character, the pathetic progress of our little knowledge, all the
frail elements of our personal life; in a word, the plastic substance of
our joys and sorrows....

I think of the little girl that I was, but between her and me there
stands a long array of children, girls and women. And I can do nothing
but inwardly repeat:

"How soon we lose our traces!..."

I smile at the memory of myself as we smile at the unknown child that
brushes against us in passing; and I leave myself to return to Rose....

2

She is a never-failing source of satisfaction to me. My dreams glory in
having discovered so much hidden virtue here, at my door; and I am
surprised at the new pleas