“Do not be angry”—­she thought that I was afraid, angry—­“Don’t be angry.  To-night, when they began to knock here, and you were still sleeping, I suddenly understood that my husband, my children—­all these were simply temporary...  I love you, very much”—­she found my hand and shook it with the same new, unfamiliar grasp—­“but do you hear how they are knocking there?  They are knocking, and something seems to be falling, some kind of walls seem to be falling—­and it is so spacious, so wide, so free.  It is night now, and yet it seems to me that the sun is shining.  I am thirty years of age, and I am old already, and yet it seems to me that I am only seventeen, and that I love some one with my first love—­a great, boundless love.”

“What a night!” I said.  “It is as if the city were no more.  You are right, I have also forgotten how old I am.”

“They are knocking, and it sounds to me like music, like singing of which I have always dreamed—­all my life.  And I did not know whom it was that I loved with such a boundless love, which made me feel like crying and laughing and singing.  There is freedom—­do not take my happiness away, let me die with those who are working there, who are calling the future so bravely, and who are rousing the dead past from its grave.”

“There is no such thing as time.”

“What do you say?”

“There is no such thing as time.  Who are you?  I did not know you.  Are you a human being?”

She burst into such ringing laughter as though she were really only seventeen years old.

“I did not know you, either.  Are you, too, a human being?  How strange and how beautiful it is—­a human being!”

That which I am writing happened long ago, and those who are sleeping now in the sleep of grey life and who die without awakening—­ those will not believe me:  in those days there was no such thing as time.  The sun was rising and setting, and the hand was moving around the dial—­but time did not exist.  And many other great and wonderful things happened in those days....  And those who are sleeping now the sleep of this grey life and who die without awakening, will not believe me.

“I must go,” said I.

“Wait, I will give you something to eat.  You haven’t eaten anything to-day.  See how sensible I am:  I shall go to-morrow.  I shall give the children away and find you.”

“Comrade,” said I.

“Yes, comrade.”

Through the open windows came the breath of the fields, and silence, and from time to time, the cheerful strokes of the axe, and I sat by the table and looked and listened, and everything was so mysteriously new that I felt like laughing.  I looked at the walls and they seemed to me to be transparent.  As if embracing all eternity with one glance, I saw how all these walls had been built, I saw how they were being destroyed, and I alone always was and always will be.  Everything will pass, but I shall remain.  And everything seemed to me strange and queer—­so unnatural—­the table and the food upon it, and everything outside of me.  It all seemed to me transparent and light, existing only temporarily.