hts in the depths
of a room--that is what we are," she said, lifting her head and looking
at him, hoping for an impossible contradiction, as a child cries for a
star.

He murmured:

"Who knows what we are?"

. . . . .

She interrupted him with a gesture of infinite weariness.

"I know what you are going to say. You are going to talk to me about
the beauty of suffering. I know your noble ideas. I love them, my
love, your beautiful theories, but I do not believe in them. I would
believe them if they consoled me and effaced death."

With a manifest effort, as uncertain of himself as she was of herself,
feeling his way, he replied:

"They would efface it, perhaps, if you believed in them."

She turned toward him and took one of his hands in both of hers. She
questioned him with inexorable patience, then she slipped to her knees
before him, like a lifeless body, humbled herself in the dust, wrecked
in the depths of despair, and implored him:

"Oh, answer me! I should be so happy if you could answer me. I feel
as though you really could!"

He bent over her, as if on the edge of an abyss of questioning:
"Do you know what we are?" he murmured. "Everything we say, everything
we think, everything we believe, is fictitious. We know nothing.
Nothing is sure or solid."

"You are wrong," she cried. "There /is/ something absolute, our
sorrow, our need, our misery. We can see and touch it. Deny
everything else, but our beggary, who can deny that?"

"You are right," he said, "it is the only absolute thing in the world."

. . . . .

"Then, /we/ are the only absolute thing in the world," he deduced.

He caught at this. He had found a fulcrum. "We--" he said. He had
found the cry against death, he repeated it, and tried again. "We--"

It was sublime to see him beginning to resist.

"It is we who endure forever."

"Endure forever! On the contrary, it is we who pass away."

"We see things pass, but we endure."

She shrugged her shoulders with an air of denial. There almost was
hatred in her voice as she said:

"Yes--no--perhaps. After all, what difference does it make to me? That
does not console me."

"Who knows--maybe we need sadness and shadow, to make joy and light."

"Light would exist without shadow," she insisted.

"No," he said gently.

"That does not console me," she said again.

. . . . .

Then he remembered that he had already thought out all these things.

"Listen," he sai