with a sort of desperate rage, in destroying those moments which we might have devoted to friendship and happiness. And on each of our remarks a sort of transcendent harshness was conferred by the paroxysm of their stupefying insignificance, which at the same time consoled me, for it prevented Gilberte from being taken in by the banality of my observations and the indifference of my tone. In vain did I say: “I thought the other day that the clock was slow, if anything,” she clearly understood me to mean: “How nasty you are!” Obstinately as I might protract, over the whole length of that rain-sodden afternoon, the dull cloud of words through which no fitful ray shone, I knew that my coldness was not so unalterably fixed as I pretended, and that Gilberte must be fully aware that if, after already saying it to her three times, I had hazarded a fourth repetition of the statement that the evenings were drawing in, I should have had difficulty in restraining myself from bursting into tears. When she was like this, when no smile filled her eyes or opened up her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost ugly, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, encircled by an immutable low horizon. At length, seeing no sign in Gilberte of the happy change for which I had been waiting now for some hours, I told her that she was not being nice. “It’s you who are not being nice,” was her answer. “Yes I am!” I wondered what I could have done, and, finding no answer, put the question to her. “Naturally, you think yourself nice!” she said to me with a laugh, and went on laughing. Whereupon I felt how agonising it was for me not to be able to attain to that other, more elusive plane of her mind which her laughter reflected. It seemed, that laughter, to mean: “No, no, I’m not going to be taken in by anything that you say, I know you’re mad about me, but that leaves me neither hot nor cold, for I don’t care a rap for you.” But I told myself that, after all, laughter was not a language so well defined that I could be certain of understanding what this laugh really meant. And Gilberte’s words were affectionate. “But how am I not being nice,” I asked her, “tell me—I’ll do anything you want.” “No; that wouldn’t be any good. I can’t explain.” For a moment I was afraid that she thought that I did not love her, and this was for me a fresh agony, no less acute, but one that required a different dialectic. “If you knew how much you were hurting me you would tell me.” But this pain which, had she doubted my love, must have rejoiced her, seemed instead to irritate her the more. Then, realising my mistake, making up my mind to pay no more attention to what she had said, letting her (without believing her) assure me: “I really did love you; you’ll see one day” (that day on which the guilty are convinced that their innocence will be made clear, and which, for some mysterious reason, never happens to be the day on which their evidence is taken), I suddenly had the courage to resolve never to see her again, and without telling her yet since she would not have believed me.
Grief that is caused by a person one loves can be bitter, even when it is interspersed with preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to the beloved. But when such a grief has its birth—as was the case with mine—at a moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us to the exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our spirits, hitherto sunny, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging storm against which we feel we may not be capable of struggling to the end. The storm that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home battered and bruised, feeling that I could recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte’s presence. But she