"I go to visit her. The interview takes place amid her familiar accustomed things, which assist and protect her. She sits beside the window—her little sewing-table, her work-basket, a dozen scattered articles. She sews without thinking of much, in the broad daylight so dazzlingly brilliant that you can't see the swing of the pendulum. Her head is bent, the sunlight grazes her neck. You feel her spirit is with her needle and thread, that is, crystallized in calm. Her tranquillized body submits in advance to the impending visit. She has only to lift her eyes to know the limits set to her being, the very boundary-line of everything she awaits.
"I enter. I go to her. My steps erect a hedge of sound around me. To make myself seen I raise my voice.... How make myself heard? I do not know.... Since truth is triumphant, the announcement of my presence may be triumphant also. It may write 'I love him' all over me before we shake hands or even give each other the first look.
"She knows. She knows everything. I feel bathed in a vast thankfulness. Just imagine: when people talk of you, she is the only one in the world who knows down to the very roots of her being the full content of their words. It is as if I were speaking to God.
"Well, I begin. Laughing, crying I impart what cannot be imparted. I hurry. The words flowing from my lips warm me with their generous wine, and I hear love pouring forth.
"I see myself, almost on my knees, scarcely perceiving her. Is it to her that I address myself? I speak merely in order to remove a barrier obstructing the light and to say the truth.
"In the breathless words that I pour out at her feet it is not a question perhaps of either her or myself. Why should it be? I never considered that I was doing her a wrong. If she reads my face, she will see things as they are. Have I turned anything away from her, have I diminished her portion, have I deprived her of anything? I have simply given you everything.
"Don't say she might repulse me and would be right if she did, because that, after all, would be the human way to act. Human to you means everything that deceives itself and denies the essential grace, everything that falls and dies in the mud of the road. Are you quite sure that a woman when she loves does not feel that sort of humanity die?