Ah! you want to know why I hate you to-day. It will probably be less
easy for you to understand than for me to explain it to you; for you
are, I think, the most perfect example of feminine impenetrability that
could possibly be found.
We had spent a long day together, and it had seemed to me short. We had
promised one another that we would think the same thoughts and that our
two souls should become one soul; a dream which is not original, after
all, except that, dreamed by all men, it has been realised by none.
In the evening you were a little tired, and you sat down outside a new
café at the corner of a new boulevard, still littered with plaster
and already displaying proudly its unfinished splendours. The café
glittered. The very gas put on all the fervency of a fresh start, and
lighted up with its full force the blinding whiteness of the walls,
the dazzling sheets of glass in the mirrors, the gilt of cornices
and mouldings, the chubby-cheeked pages straining back from hounds
in leash, the ladies laughing at the falcons on their wrists, the
nymphs and goddesses carrying fruits and pies and game on their heads,
the Hebes and Ganymedes holding out at arm's-length little jars of
syrups or parti-coloured obelisks of ices; the whole of history and of
mythology brought together to make a paradise for gluttons. Exactly
opposite to us, in the roadway, stood a man of about forty years of
age, with a weary face and a greyish beard, holding a little boy by one
hand and carrying on the other arm a little fellow too weak to walk.
He was taking the nurse-maid's place, and had brought his children
out for a walk in the evening. All were in rags. The three faces were
extraordinarily serious, and the six eyes stared fixedly at the new
café with an equal admiration, differentiated in each according to age.
The father's eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how beautiful it is! One
would think that all the gold of the poor world had found its way to
these walls." The boy's eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how beautiful
it is! But that is a house which only people who are not like us can
enter." As for the little one's eyes, they were too fascinated to
express anything but stupid and utter joy.
Song-writers say that pleasure ennobles the soul and softens the heart.
The song was right that evening, so far as I was concerned. Not only
was I touched by this family of eyes, but I felt rather ashamed of
our glasses and decanters, so much too much for our thirst. I turned
to look at you, dear love, that I might read my own thought in you; I
gazed deep into your eyes, so beautiful and so strangely sweet, your
green eyes that are the home of caprice and under the sovereignty of
the Moon; and you said to me: "Those people are insupportable to me
with their staring saucer-eyes! Couldn't you tell the head waiter to
send them away?"
So hard is it to understand one another, dearest, and so incommunicable
is thought, even between people who are in love!
V