"May God bless the bit of pleasure one has."
A doleful lament, the first signal of a tremendous fall, a prayer blasphemous yet divine.
I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to give him. There was a suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his expression.
"No," she said, "you are not going to love me always. You are going to leave me. But I regret nothing. I never will regret anything. Afterwards, when I return from—/this/—for good, to the great sorrow that will never leave me again, I shall say, 'I have had a lover,' and I shall come out from my nothingness to be happy for a moment."
He did not want to answer. He could not answer any more. He stammered:
"Why do you doubt me?"
But they turned their eyes toward the window. They were afraid, they were cold. They looked down at the space between the two houses and saw a vague remnant of twilight slip away like a ship of glory.
It seemed to me that the window beside them entered the scene. They gazed at it, dim, immense, blotting out everything around it. After the brief interval of sinful passion, they were overwhelmed as if, looking at the stainless azure of the window, they had seen a vision. Then their eyes met.
"See, we stay here," she said, "looking at each other like two miserable curs."
They separated. He seated himself on a chair, a sorry figure in the dusk.