"It's amazing, this evening, what a happy look everybody has!"
And they kept smiling without taking heed of what had occurred. They knew only that they had it, that they possessed it and that it belonged to them. It? What? Nothing. We feel rich this evening!... On getting home they looked at themselves carefully in the mirror just as one looks at a friend, with loving eyes. They said to themselves: "That gaze of his, of hers, was fixed on you." They went to bed early, overcome—but wherefore?—by a delicious weariness. While they undressed they kept thinking:
"What's best of all at present is, that there's a tomorrow."
Tomorrow!... Those who come after us will have some difficulty in understanding what silent despair and weariness of spirit without grounds that word evoked during the fourth year of the war.... Oh, such a weariness! So many times had hopes been destroyed! Hundreds of tomorrows just like yesterday and today followed on, each similarly devoted to emptiness and waiting—to waiting for emptiness. Time no longer ran. The year was like a river Styx which encircles life with the circuit of its black and greasy waters, with its somber, watery, silky flood that seems no longer to move. Tomorrow? Tomorrow is dead.
In the hearts of these children Tomorrow was resuscitated from the grave.
Tomorrow saw them seated again near the fountain. And tomorrows followed one another. The fine weather favored these very brief meetings, every day a little less brief. Each one brought a lunch in order to have the pleasure of exchanging. Pierre now waited at the door of the Museum. He wanted to see her art works. Although she was not proud of them she did not make him beg at all before showing them. They were reproductions of famous paintings in miniature, or portions of paintings, a group, a figure, a bust. Not too disagreeable at the first glance but extremely loose in drawing. Here and there quite true and pretty touches; but right alongside the mistakes of a pupil, exhibiting not merely the most elementary ignorance but a reckless ease perfectly careless of what anyone might think.—"Enough! Good enough the way they are!"—Luce recited the names of the pictures copied. Pierre knew them too well. His face was quite drawn from his discomfiture. Luce felt that he was not pleased; but she summoned all her courage to show him everything—and this one too.... Woof!... it was the ugliest one she had! She kept up her mocking smile which was directed to her own address as well as to Pierre's; but she would not confess to herself a pinch of vexation. Pierre hardened his lips in order not to speak. But at last it was too much for him. She showed him a copy of a Florentine Raphael.
"But these are not its colors!" said he.
"Oh, well, that wouldn't be surprising," said she. "I didn't go and look at it. I took a photo."
"And didn't anybody object?"