Her thought is
higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all
that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer
anything." And _I_--I am only he who is present with her just now, and
no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.

I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and
simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with
her presence--but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I
can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief.

"Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!"

But she, too, has tried to cling to illusion. I see by the track of
her tears, and because I am looking at her--that she has powdered her
face to-day and put rouge on her lips, perhaps even on her cheeks, as
she did in bygone days, laughing, to set herself off, in spite of me.
This woman who tries to keep a good likeness of herself through passing
time, to be fixed upon herself, who paints herself, she is, to that
extent like what Rembrandt the profound and Titian the bold and
exquisite did--make enduring, and save! But this time, a few tears
have washed away the fragile, mortal effort.

She tries also to delude herself with words, and to discover something
in them which would transform her. She asserts, as she did the other
morning, "There must be illusion. No, we must not see things as they
are." But I see clearly that such words do not exist.

Once, when she was looking at me distressfully, she murmured,
"_You_--you've no more illusion at all. I pity you!"

At that moment, within the space of a flash, she was thinking of me
only, and she pities me! She has found something in her grief to give
me.

She is silent. She is seeking the supreme complaint; she is trying to
find what there is which is more torturing and more simple; and she
stammers--"The truth."

The truth is that the love of mankind is a single season among so many
others. The truth is that we have within us something much more mortal
than we are, and that it is this, all the same, which is all-important.
Therefore we survive very much longer than we live. There are things
we think we know and which yet are secrets. Do we really know what we
believe? We believe in miracles. We make great efforts to struggle,
to go mad. We should like to let all our good deserts be seen. We
fancy that we are exceptions and that something supernatural is going
t