It was a revery; two lovers who are seeking one another, groping in the darkness of a garden on a lovely summer night; you hear their hesitating footsteps, you suspect their vexed and feverish gestures, their eager lips that call one another without imprudently pronouncing a name; though their footsteps creak upon the gravel and a fountain drops its slow pearls into the basin. Suddenly the music of a waltz attracts them separately to the lighted house, and they exchange kisses on the steps of the entrance, before being swallowed up in the intoxicating motion.
"Oh!" exclaimed Odette, thrilled, "do you remember, do you remember?"
"What?" asked Simone.
"Why, everything! Everything that happened before, before this end of the world that never ends!"
Odette, overcome by the harmonious reminder of the waltz of a possible festival, of the joy of living, of being pretty, young, beloved, could only repeat:
"I haven't heard ... anything ... for more than eighteen months, Simone! Do you remember that evening at Mme. Sormellier's, at Bellevue, where both our husbands were so beautiful?"
"And we, too, Odette! We shall be old after the war. We shall have had hardly five or six years of youth. I will confess to you that sometimes I juggle with fate. I go to see Clotilde, who refuses to permit herself to be touched by events. She says: 'I can do nothing about it; I am good for nothing. Let the world let me alone as I let it alone! Till my last hour I will stay with my flowers, my books, and my music.'"
"Ah! Clotilde, yes; do you know, I had forgotten her!"
"Everybody is forgetting her, and she forgets everybody. Her husband is at Great Headquarters; he often comes. She is a privileged person, and she says: 'Why should I not accept all the good that is offered me?'"
"Yes," said Odette, "it is tempting, but I could not do it.—No, I could not.—See, I tried to shut myself up with my grief. Well, I could not. It is too great—this universal sorrow—too absorbing. Listen!"