th's neck is already a woman, a woman unconsciously, whom a caress
may awaken to conscious womanhood. When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is
because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are
made by a kiss. It was on that dark and cold December night, amid the
bitter wailing of the tocsin, that Miette and Silvere exchanged one of
those kisses that bring all the heart's blood to the lips.

They remained silent, close to one another. A gentle glow soon
penetrated them, languor overcame them, and steeped them in feverish
drowsiness. They were quite warm at last, and lights seemed to flit
before their closed eyelids, while a buzzing mounted to their brains.
This state of painful ecstasy, which lasted some minutes, seemed
endless to them. Then, in a kind of dream, their lips met. The kiss they
exchanged was long and greedy. It seemed to them as if they had never
kissed before. Yet their embrace was fraught with suffering and they
released one another. And the chilliness of the night having cooled
their fever, they remained in great confusion at some distance one from
the other.

Meantime the bells were keeping up their sinister converse in the
dark abyss which surrounded the young people. Miette, trembling and
frightened, did not dare to draw near to Silvere again. She did not even
know if he were still there, for she could no longer hear him move. The
stinging sweetness of their kiss still clung to their lips, to which
passionate phrases surged, and they longed to kiss once more. But shame
restrained them from the expression of any such desire. They felt that
they would rather never taste that bliss again than speak of it aloud.
If their blood had not been lashed by their rapid march, if the darkness
had not offered complicity, they would, for a long time yet, have
continued kissing each other on the cheeks like old playfellows.
Feelings of modesty were coming to Miette. She remembered Justin's
coarseness. A few hours previously she had listened, without a blush,
to that fellow who called her a shameless girl. She had wept without
understanding his meaning, she had wept simply because she guessed that
what he spoke of must be base. Now that she was becoming a woman, she
wondered in a last innocent transport whether that kiss, whose burning
smart she could still feel, would not perhaps suffice to cover her with
the shame to which her cousin had referred. Thereupon she was seized
with remorse, and burst i