o come along. But the quiet peace of the truth fixes us. The
impossible becomes again the impossible. We are as silent as silence
itself.

We stayed lonely on the seat until evening. Our hands and faces shone
like gleams of storm in the entombment of the calm and the mist.

We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these few
hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as
never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real
drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our
movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is
empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each
other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation
of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but
close by--so close--are phantoms!

Then bedtime comes. She is sleeping in the little bedroom opposite
mine across the landing, less fine than mine and smaller, hung with an
old and faded paper, where the patterned flowers are only an irregular
relief, with traces here and there of powder, of colored dust and
ashes.

We are going to separate on the landing. To-day is not the first time
like that! but to-day we are feeling this great rending which is not
one. She has begun to undress. She has taken off her blouse. I see
her neck and her breasts, a little less firm than before, through her
chemise; and half tumbling on to the nape of her neck, the fair hair
which once magnificently flamed on her like a fire of straw.

She only says, "It's better to be a man than a woman."

Then she replies to my silence, "You see, we don't know what to say,
now."

In the angle of the narrow doorway she spoke with a kind of immensity.

She goes into her room and disappears. Before I went to the war we
slept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to be
annihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else.
(Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas.
For man and wife--to sleep, to die.) But since I came back we separate
ourselves with a wall. This sincerity that I have brought back in my
eyes and mind has changed the semblances round about me into reality,
more than I imagine. Marie is hiding from me her faded but disregarded
body. Her modesty has begun again; yes, she has ended by beginning
again.

She has shut her door. She is undressing, alone in h