Black on white, a head surcharged with mystery and night, two jewels, no, two green pools, a mouth that revealed the shape of a kiss better than other mouths, a figure not very tall but with a race and suppleness which lent dignity. Clothes planned to reveal the curves of her body. Movements kindling I know not what lights. Woman, in short, with all a woman has in her of the venomous and the childlike.
We sat directly opposite each other at table. The charm of her vivid smile, glowing face, and darting movements turned the frugal meal for me into a riotous feast.
One morning as I was starting out on a walk by myself for nowhere in particular she came up to me in an easy spontaneous way, as if there really did exist a sisterhood among women. Part of her loveliness was a deep, maternal voice; in crystal tones she plunged into a surprising eulogy of the relationship between my husband and me. She had noticed us. How perfectly united we must be! "Married? Absurd!" She pouted. But we had such a way of locking arms, and looking and waiting for each other, also such a....
She went on talking and talking. I was rather bewildered.... Was it really us she was describing—sombre with passion, eagerly relishing a concord that was pregnant with storms which might break suddenly from a clear sky? Wasn't it more like her own love? I was at a loss how to answer. Still I could not recognize ourselves. She clutched me and laughingly declared I was a little savage, and my being a little savage pleased her.
We came to where the country takes a sudden dip, so that to be visible to the heavens it has to cling to the bronzed trunks of the half-stripped cork-trees. We went on breasting the wind. I knitted my brows. Everything she said breathed, at least to me, another age or another sphere; it all hinged on love, was dedicated to love, and by that very fact created a distance between us. I saw her cramped and confined by the very thing that gave her so much vitality; I saw it was her crucifixion. She was nothing but the instinct for love restricted to the need of man. Nevertheless she attracted me.
We got to know each other better. She astonished me more and more. Whether she and her lover carried on a squally conversation on the bench in the hall or whether she wandered along the narrow, brambly paths in a sort of ferocious abandon, or whether she came to me and threw her thorny crown at my feet with a radiant gesture, she was Woman as men have described her, as they have wanted her. She was the ancient bearer of a fatal property, the creature who either subdues her opponent or is subdued by him, and knows nothing else; the sorry creature of tears and fascinations....
She never spoke of her life or of herself. We were two women, our lot therefore was the same, she was in love, I was in love. What else need one want?
"Good-bye for the present," she cried as the cart set off down the road at a snail's pace. She stood with her head inclined tenderly sidewise and her floating veil prolonging the farewell.... There was a bend in the road. I thought that was to be my last view of her.
But a little while ago as I was going to lie down, an imperious ring tore the silence. Actually she, her smile, her veil, her dress a tangle of silver.
"What a pretty little nest! How comfortable you must be! Well, well. Still happy?"