"But we're the intelligent ones! We are the lords of the future! Don't you hear the clatter of our wooden shoes going up and of their satin slippers coming down?"
"We? What, you?" said Regina, contemptuously.
"Mind that carriage!" cried Arduina, pulling her back.
"You see? They drive over us! What's the good of intelligence? What is intelligence compared with a satin train?"
"Oh, I see! You're jealous of the satin train," said the other, laughing good-humouredly.
"Oh, you're a fool!" cried Regina, beside herself.
"Thanks!" said Arduina, unoffended.
Returned home, Regina threw herself on the ottoman in the ante-room, and remained there nearly an hour, beating the devil's tattoo with her foot in time to the ticking of the clock, which seemed the heart of the little room. Her own heart was overflown by a wave of humiliating distress. Ah! even the ridiculous Arduina had guessed what ailed her.
Daylight was dying in the adjacent room, and the dining-room, which looked out on the courtyard, was already overwhelmed in heavy shadow. The open door made a band of feeble light across the passage of the ante-room, while in its angles the penumbra continually darkened. Watching it, Regina reflected.
"The penumbra! What a horrid thing is the penumbra! Horrid? No, it's worse! It's noxious—soul-stifling! Better a thousand times the full shadow, complete darkness. In the shadow there is grief, desperation, rebellion—all that is life; but in this half-light it's all tedium, want, agony. It's better to be a beggar than a little bourgeois. The beggar can yell, can spit in the face of the prosperous. The little bourgeois is silent; he's a dead soul, he neither can nor ought to speak. What does he want? Hasn't he got the competence already, which some day every one is to have? His share is already given to him. If he asks for more he's called ambitious, egotistic, envious. Even the idiots call him so! Satin trains—green and shining halls like gardens spread out in the sun—motors like flying dragons! And the gardens, the beautiful gardens 'half seen through little gates,' country houses hidden among pines, like rosy women under green lace parasols! That should be the heritage of the future, of the to-morrow, promised us though not yet come. But no! all that is to disappear! The world is small and can't be divided into more than two parts, the day and the night, the light and the shade. But some day it's to be all penumbra! Every one's to be like us, every one's to live in a little dark Apartment with interminable stairs; all the streets are to be dusty, overrun by smelly trams, by troops of middle-class women who will go about on foot, dressed with sham elegance, wearing mock jewellery, carrying paper fans; joyous with a pitiable joy. The whole world will be tedium and destitution. The beggars won't have attained to the dreams which made them happy; the children of the rich will live on nostalgia, remembering the dream which was once reality to them. What will be the good of living then? Why am I living now?"