After lunch I wander in the streets.  In the house I am bored, and yet outside I do not know what to do.  I have no friend and no calls to pay.  I am already too big to mingle with some, and too little yet to associate with others.  The cafes and licensed shops hum, jingle and smoke already.  I do not go to cafes, on principle, and because of that fondness for spending nothing, which my aunt has impressed on me.  So, aimless, I walk through the deserted streets, which at every corner yawn before my feet.  The hours strike and I have the impression that they are useless, that one will do nothing with them.

I steer in the direction of the fine gardens which slope towards the river.  A little enviously I look over the walls at the tops of these opulent enclosures, at the tips of those great branches where still clings the soiled, out-of-fashion finery of last summer.

Far from there, and a good while after, I encounter Tudor, the clerk at the Modern Pharmacy.  He hesitates and doubts, and does not know where to go.  Every Sunday he wears the same collar, with turned down corners, and it is becoming gloomy.  Arrived where I am, he stops, as though it occurred to him that nothing was pushing him forward.  A half-extinguished cigarette vegetates in his mouth.

He comes with me, and I take his silence in tow as far as the avenue of plane trees.  There are several figures outspaced in its level peace.  Some young girls attract my attention; they appear against the dullness of house-fronts and against shop fronts in mourning.  Some of the charming ones are accompanied by their mothers, who look like caricatures of them.

Tudor has left me without my noticing it.

Already, and slowly everywhere, the taverns begin to shine and cry out.  In the grayness of twilight one discerns a dark and mighty crowd, gliding therein.  In them gathers a sort of darkling storm, and flashes emerge from them.

* * * * * *

And lo!  Now the night approaches to soften the stony streets.

Along the riverside, to which I have gone down alone, listless idylls dimly appear,—­shapes sketched in crayon, which seek and join each other.  There are couples that appear and vanish, strictly avoiding the little light that is left.  Night is wiping out colors and features and names from both sorts of strollers.

I notice a woman who waits, standing on the river bank.  Her silhouette has pearly-gray sky behind it, so that she seems to support the darkness.  I wonder what her name may be, but only discover the beauty of her feminine stillness.  Not far from that consummate caryatid, among the black columns of the tall trees laid against the lave of the blue, and beneath their cloudy branches, there are mystic enlacements which move to and fro; and hardly can one distinguish the two halves of which they are made, for the temple of night is enclosing them.