the roads without any aim. I was like a man in fever, assailed by all manner of forebodings, unable to fix my thoughts on a single point. By God, I wished some accident might befall me and end my life, to deliver me from what I was in.
When lunchtime came I returned to the house, and hesitated long before entering it, asking myself: what is she doing now? Is she still sunk where she was, or has she gone to her family? I turned the key in the door and entered like a thief — and there was the house in the best of order: the flowers fresh and arranged in their vases, and everything gleaming — the floor, the walls, the windowpanes, the mirrors. What a fairy she is! How could she have accomplished all that, when we keep no servant, and she in such grief and anxiety and agitation? What can she be aiming at behind all this? Is it to prove to her rival that she is a mistress of the house of the first order? I was dumbfounded when I saw two large suitcases in the entrance; then she appeared before me, dressed in her full outdoor clothes, her face still pale, her eyes worn. My tongue failed me before her; then she said in a low voice, without looking at me: Would you be so kind as to drive me in your car to my family's house? I answered in a quavering voice: As you wish. Then she looked at the two suitcases, and looked at me, and said: Will you carry them, or shall I? I said, stammering: No — I will carry them. And I carried the two heavy suitcases and put them in the trunk of the car, saying to myself: My God, is it with such ease that everything between us is concluded?
Then she closed the house door gently and took the whole of it in with one glance, as if bidding it a last farewell; then she walked, head bowed, to the car, opened its door, and sat in the back seat, contrary to her habit. I was on the
point of inviting her to sit beside me — but would not my inviting her be absurdity itself?
I turned the wheel of the car, my hands trembling — and suddenly she cried out to me: Stop! Stop, for God's sake! I forgot — I forgot to close the windows of the sitting room, and the sun will ruin the blue curtains. So I stopped the car, and she went back to close the windows; and I leaned my weary head on the wheel and closed my eyes and began saying to myself:
Poor soul! What are the blue curtains to you now, whether the sun ruins them or not? You know very well that they are yours no longer — that they will soon become the property of a rival of yours. And I remembered how she had gone round the markets when she bought those curtains, until she found that rare shade of blue; and how many days she spent bent over them, embroidering their edges and hemming their borders. No one ever entered our house without praising those curtains, and the taste that had chosen them, and the craftsman's hand that had embroidered them. You, poor soul, are the mother of this house: you created it, you tended it, and you want it whole and kept from harm, as a mother wants her child, even if it be in another's keeping. What a hard, stony-hearted man I am! How could I deprive you of all this? Ah, if only you could bear children! And at once there loomed in my imagination the figure of the girl of twenty, bending and laughing and looking at me slyly, as if to say: Is it truly for the children's sake that you leave her — or for mine?
And I found myself leaping from the car, crossing the garden in two strides, and pushing the door — colliding with her face to face behind it; then seizing her hand and drawing her back into the house, saying to her: Is it not better, my dear, that you stay here to look after your blue curtains? She understood what I meant, and collapsed onto the first seat she saw and burst into tears. Her strong nerves, which had been
able to master the tears of grief, could not master the tears of joy.
And I found myself kneeling before her and kissing her hands; then I reached into my pocket and took the diamond ring from its velvet box and placed it on her finger; and she pressed my head to her, and her tears fell warm upon my face. I felt an immense relief, as if a heavy load had been lifted from my shoulders — or as if I were a drowning man who had wrestled with waves and tempests, and, coming at last to the shore of safety, sank into rest. So let this be a spell, my friend: I am content with it, at peace in it, and I would accept no deliverance from it, as though it had never been.