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