They caught hold of each other's arms and shoulders and held out their lips, as if their mouths were birds.
"Jean!" "Hélène!" came softly.
It was the first thing they had found out. To embrace the embracer, is it not the tiniest caress and the least sort of a bond? And yet it is so sternly prohibited.
Again they seemed to me to be without age.
They were like all lovers, while they held hands, their faces joined, trembling and blind, in the shadow of a kiss.
. . . . .
They broke off, and disengaged themselves from their embrace, whose meaning they had not yet learned.
They talked with their innocent lips. About what? About the past, which was so near and so short.
They were leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance. They spoke of a house and a garden where they had both lived.
The house absorbed them. It was surrounded by a garden wall, so that from the road all you could see was the tip of the eaves, and you couldn't tell what was going on inside of it.