Then bedtime comes.  She is sleeping in the little bedroom opposite mine across the landing, less fine than mine and smaller, hung with an old and faded paper, where the patterned flowers are only an irregular relief, with traces here and there of powder, of colored dust and ashes.

We are going to separate on the landing.  To-day is not the first time like that! but to-day we are feeling this great rending which is not one.  She has begun to undress.  She has taken off her blouse.  I see her neck and her breasts, a little less firm than before, through her chemise; and half tumbling on to the nape of her neck, the fair hair which once magnificently flamed on her like a fire of straw.

She only says, “It’s better to be a man than a woman.”

Then she replies to my silence, “You see, we don’t know what to say, now.”

In the angle of the narrow doorway she spoke with a kind of immensity.

She goes into her room and disappears.  Before I went to the war we slept in the same bed.  We used to lie down side by side, so as to be annihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else.  (Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas.  For man and wife—­to sleep, to die.) But since I came back we separate ourselves with a wall.  This sincerity that I have brought back in my eyes and mind has changed the semblances round about me into reality, more than I imagine.  Marie is hiding from me her faded but disregarded body.  Her modesty has begun again; yes, she has ended by beginning again.

She has shut her door.  She is undressing, alone in her room, slowly, and as if uselessly.  There is only the light of her little lamp to caress her loosened hair, in which the others cannot yet see the white ones, the frosty hairs that she alone touches.

Her door is shut, decisive, banal, dreary.

Among some papers on my table I see the poem again which we once found out of doors, the bit of paper escaped from the mysterious hands which wrote on it, and come to the stone seat.  It ended by whispering, “Only I know the tears that brimming rise, your beauty blended with your smile to espy.”

In the days of yore it had made us smile with delight.  To-night there are real tears in my eyes.  What is it?  I dimly see that there is something more than what we have seen, than what we have said, than what we have felt to-day.  One day, perhaps, she and I will exchange better and richer sayings; and so, in that day, all the sadness will be of some service.

CHAPTER XX

THE CULT

I have been to the factory.  I felt as much lost as if I had found myself translated there after a sleep of legendary length.  There are many new faces.  The factory has tripled—­quadrupled in importance; quite a town of flimsy buildings has been added to it.

“They’ve built seven others like it in three months!” says Monsieur Mielvaque to me, proudly.