“You would be astonished to know how little I care for your mind.”

“Would I?  Come and sit on the couch all the same,” she said after a moment of hesitation.  Then, as I did not move at once, she added with indifference:  “You may sit as far away as you like, it’s big enough, goodness knows.”

The light was ebbing slowly out of the rotunda and to my bodily eyes she was beginning to grow shadowy.  I sat down on the couch and for a long time no word passed between us.  We made no movement.  We did not even turn towards each other.  All I was conscious of was the softness of the seat which seemed somehow to cause a relaxation of my stern mood, I won’t say against my will but without any will on my part.  Another thing I was conscious of, strangely enough, was the enormous brass bowl for cigarette ends.  Quietly, with the least possible action, Dona Rita moved it to the other side of her motionless person.  Slowly, the fantastic women with butterflies’ wings and the slender-limbed youths with the gorgeous pinions on their shoulders were vanishing into their black backgrounds with an effect of silent discretion, leaving us to ourselves.

I felt suddenly extremely exhausted, absolutely overcome with fatigue since I had moved; as if to sit on that Pompeiian chair had been a task almost beyond human strength, a sort of labour that must end in collapse.  I fought against it for a moment and then my resistance gave way.  Not all at once but as if yielding to an irresistible pressure (for I was not conscious of any irresistible attraction) I found myself with my head resting, with a weight I felt must be crushing, on Dona Rita’s shoulder which yet did not give way, did not flinch at all.  A faint scent of violets filled the tragic emptiness of my head and it seemed impossible to me that I should not cry from sheer weakness.  But I remained dry-eyed.  I only felt myself slipping lower and lower and I caught her round the waist clinging to her not from any intention but purely by instinct.  All that time she hadn’t stirred.  There was only the slight movement of her breathing that showed her to be alive; and with closed eyes I imagined her to be lost in thought, removed by an incredible meditation while I clung to her, to an immense distance from the earth.  The distance must have been immense because the silence was so perfect, the feeling as if of eternal stillness.  I had a distinct impression of being in contact with an infinity that had the slightest possible rise and fall, was pervaded by a warm, delicate scent of violets and through which came a hand from somewhere to rest lightly on my head.  Presently my ear caught the faint and regular pulsation of her heart, firm and quick, infinitely touching in its persistent mystery, disclosing itself into my very ear—­and my felicity became complete.

It was a dreamlike state combined with a dreamlike sense of insecurity.  Then in that warm and scented infinity, or eternity, in which I rested lost in bliss but ready for any catastrophe, I heard the distant, hardly audible, and fit to strike terror into the heart, ringing of a bell.  At this sound the greatness of spaces departed.  I felt the world close about me; the world of darkened walls, of very deep grey dusk against the panes, and I asked in a pained voice: