re vigorously, and the last remnants went down with me in the roar of
a far-off, formidable lullaby.

I soon awoke. Still bemoaning her lot, with the same phrase, it seemed
to me, always at the same point. She went on with such bitter
persistence that in the end you couldn't help learning her story by
heart. I did at any rate. The two women kept looking at each
other--shadowy vis-a-vis--the younger one far from the other, far from
us, far from everything, rooted in her life, in her square garden, in
her thirty years. It was as if she were talking aloud for the first
time.

I listened. Each detail revealed a year, a corner of the house, an
important event. I felt a dull rage fermenting in me instead of the
timidity and compunction one usually experiences in trespassing upon
another's inmost recesses.

Why? Perhaps because I, a stranger, had not the power to interpose and
hold the secret of this trouble so as to remedy it.

Ah, I no longer need to listen nor need to know the man in order to feel
that he is right to lose himself in his business and be merely a good
father who sees in his wife nothing but the mother of his children and
shrugs his shoulders when she heaves with sighs.

The evening air was blowing in cooler through the upper half of the
window. We were entering a plain where the green of the meadows was
deepening into mauve. Two rows of trees, which had been a profile
against the sky when seen from afar, turned into a black curtain
suddenly drawn. Here and there houses stood out as though groping in the
dark--faces blotted out as soon as arisen--one field swallowed up the
next; the ragged line of a hedge came and went; an embankment followed,
its slope daubed with brown, unwholesome stains, its top dressed with
tufted grass and straggling bushes, which moved their arms like signals.

The young woman's brows were drawn. She was questioning the obscure
flickering stretch of space. I read the questions in her face: Why does
he merely graze her forehead when he comes back in the evening? Why does
he keep her out of everything? Why does he never feast on her presence
or heed her advice? How did he love her? She had been right a short
while before when she had said bitterly: "A little less than a
prostitute, a little more than a servant."

The woman was certainly suffering and calling upon a God who could not
answer. At night when the close jealous house is asleep, she undoubtedly
falls to her knees in secr