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By Root 1720 0

cruel suffering that they have penetrated to our hearts. The picture of the beloved in our minds which we believe to be old, original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by us many times over. The cruel memory, on the other hand, is not contemporaneous with the restored picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in ourselves who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous golden age, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled, those memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make us feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been borne from that reality by the baseless hopes engendered by our daily expectation. Not that the said reality is bound always to remain the same, though that does indeed happen at times. There are in our lives any number of women whom we have never sought to see again, and who have quite naturally responded to our in no way calculated silence with a silence as profound. Only in their case, since we never loved them, we have never counted the years spent apart from them, and this instance, which would invalidate our whole argument, we are inclined to forget when we consider the healing effect of isolation, just as people who believe in presentiments forget all the occasions on which their own have not come true.

But after a time, absence may prove efficacious. The desire, the appetite for seeing us again may after all be reborn in the heart which at present contemns us. Only, we must allow time. But our demands as far as time is concerned are no less exorbitant than those which the heart requires in order to change. For one thing, time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the time which the other heart will need in order to change will have been spent by our own heart in changing itself too, so that when the goal we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to be our goal. Besides, the very idea that it will be attainable, that there is no happiness that, when it has ceased to be a happiness for us, we cannot ultimately attain, contains an element, but only an element, of truth. It falls to us when we have grown indifferent to it. But the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and enabled us in retrospect to feel convinced that it would have delighted us had it come at a time when perhaps it would have seemed to us miserably inadequate. One is not very particular, nor a very good judge, about things which no longer matter to one. The friendly overtures of a person whom we no longer love, overtures which in our indifference strike us as excessive, would perhaps have fallen a long way short of satisfying our love. Those tender words, that offer to meet us, we think only of the pleasure which they would have given us, and not of all those other words and meetings by which we should have wished to see them immediately followed, and which by this greed of ours we might perhaps have prevented from ever happening. So that we can never be certain that the happiness which comes to us too late, when we can no longer enjoy it, when we are no longer in love, is altogether the same as that same happiness the lack of which made us at one time so unhappy. There is only one person who could decide this—our then self; it is no longer with us, and were it to reappear, no doubt our happiness—identical or not—would vanish.

Pending these belated fulfilments of a dream about which I should by then have ceased to care, by dint of inventing, as in the days when I still hardly knew Gilberte, words or letters in which she implored my forgiveness, swore that she had never loved anyone but myself and besought me to marry her, a series of pleasant images incessantly renewed came by degrees to hold a larger place in my mind than the vision of Gilberte and the young man, which had nothing now to feed upon. At this point I should