When I came back to the terrace under the star-lit night of March, I looked at the sky, and it seemed that a child was walking there treasuring many lamps behind her veils.
If their light went out, she would suddenly stop and a cry would sound from sky to sky, "Father, I have lost myself!"
14
The evening stood bewildered among street lamps, its gold tarnished by the city dust.
A woman, gaudily decked and painted, leant over the rail of her balcony, a living fire waiting for its moths.
Suddenly an eddy was formed in the road round a street-boy crushed under the wheels of a carriage, and the woman on the balcony fell to the floor screaming in agony, stricken with the grief of the great white-robed Mother who sits in the world's inner shrine.
15
I remember the scene on the barren heath—a girl sat alone on the grass before the gipsy camp, braiding her hair in the afternoon shade.
Her little dog jumped and barked at her busy hands, as though her employment had no importance.
In vain did she rebuke it, calling it "a pest," saying she was tired of its perpetual silliness.