everything dropping from you and becoming quite pale
and unsubstantial, the tiresome garden at home, and Joseph with the
dinner-bell, and the tea with bread and butter, and that Billy in the
white dress, who could do nothing and have no thoughts? All that is
unreal? and there is only one reality, and that is I. Tell me, do you
feel that?"

Billy leaned her head against Boris's shoulder and closed her eyes.
Certainly, all that was very far away, the garden, her room with the
drawn curtains, the sleeping Marion, the old familiar voices of the
clocks in the quiet rooms--all strange and unreal, as if it did not
belong to her. But the carriage here with its cramped space and its
darkness, the rushing of the rain, the rattle of the windowpanes, were
they real? were the hands real that seized, pressed, and shook her as
if she no longer belonged to herself, as if she belonged to another,
the lips which were hotly pressed to hers, and this voice which spoke
softly and passionately into the darkness? And she herself, who was
she, with a body and a blood in which a strange fever was venturing
forth. She felt the Billy that she had known and believed in melting
away within her, and it seemed as if something which had heretofore
held her were releasing her, and now she was drifting along and
everything was immaterial, for after all that did not belong to her,
that burning and fever which it was now her sole business to attend to
and obey. Now they were both silent. The rain seemed to be growing
heavier, and with ever increasing frequency the hasty light of the
lightning flashes flickered across the black forest. The carriage only
progressed with difficulty, shaking and rocking. A great weariness made
Billy's limbs heavy, as if they did not belong to her, and
imperceptibly she passed over into a dream-state, into that torturing
somnolescence of first sleep in which the dream-figures approach us so
importunately. It was the face of her father that suddenly rose before
Billy, close before her, so close that the long white nose touched
Billy's nose like something cold, and in the stern iron-gray eyes
little golden points were moving, as always when he was angry. And she
heard him speak in the calm, slightly nasal voice: "Yes, if this
striking out were always possible," he was saying. A loud peal of
thunder made Billy start up; she did not know where she was, only
something heavy and sad was burdening her. She was cold. Boris too had
b