it was only one single force, the soul of the world, working to
fuse things and beings in a final kiss of love in fifty centuries more.
She had calculated the number of them, she said.

For the rest, Pascal had never before seen her so excited. For the
past week, during which she had attended the Capuchin's mission in the
cathedral, she had spent the days visibly in the expectation of the
sermon of the evening; and she went to hear it with the rapt exaltation
of a girl who is going to her first rendezvous of love. Then, on the
following day, everything about her declared her detachment from the
exterior life, from her accustomed existence, as if the visible world,
the necessary actions of every moment, were but a snare and a folly.
She retired within herself in the vision of what was not. Thus she had
almost completely given up her habitual occupations, abandoning herself
to a sort of unconquerable indolence, remaining for hours at a time
with her hands in her lap, her gaze lost in vacancy, rapt in the
contemplation of some far-off vision. Now she, who had been so active,
so early a riser, rose late, appearing barely in time for the second
breakfast, and it could not have been at her toilet that she spent these
long hours, for she forgot her feminine coquetry, and would come down
with her hair scarcely combed, negligently attired in a gown buttoned
awry, but even thus adorable, thanks to her triumphant youth. The
morning walks through La Souleiade that she had been so fond of, the
races from the top to the bottom of the terraces planted with olive and
almond trees, the visits to the pine grove balmy with the odor of resin,
the long sun baths in the hot threshing yard, she indulged in no more;
she preferred to remain shut up in her darkened room, from which not a
movement was to be heard. Then, in the afternoon, in the work room, she
would drag herself about languidly from chair to chair, doing nothing,
tired and disgusted with everything that had formerly interested her.

Pascal was obliged to renounce her assistance; a paper which he gave
her to copy remained three days untouched on her desk. She no longer
classified anything; she would not have stooped down to pick up a paper
from the floor. More than all, she abandoned the pastels, copies of
flowers from nature that she had been making, to serve as plates to a
work on artificial fecundations. Some large red mallows, of a new and
singular coloring, faded in their vas