at me from under her hat, gravely as a Red Indian. “There were two roads leading from a certain tree, and when we were eighteen life said to me, ‘You go this way,’ and life said to Napier, ‘You go that way.’ And so we did that, and so it has been....”

Now I was staring at her mouth, which was a silky red mouth engraved with I don’t know how many deep downward lines, and my heart beat twice so loudly that I wondered if she had heard it, for she whispered sharply: “Listen!” But it was only a clock striking somewhere in London, and its striking was quickly done.

“I must go,” she said, but not even the armchair creaked, and her green hat was still crushed against the back of the chair, and her eyes were still staring profoundly over my shoulder. There was only the window there. The curtains were not{42} drawn, and I thought I would draw them, but it seemed a pity to move. Her eyes glowed like an animal’s. She was staring, absorbed, over my right shoulder, but there was only the window there. She was asleep. Then her eyes dilated into glowing points, and her lips said: “On a envie.”

{42}

Then she made a gesture of distaste.

She said: “There are desires....”

“Heavens, do you need to tell me that!”

“Oh, not those desires!” Expressionless, blazing eyes absorbed over my shoulder, she waved away “those desires.” I was snubbed.

“They call it,” she said, “the desire-for-I-know-not-what. They will find it one day when we are dead and all things that live now are dead. They will find it when everything is dead but the dreams we have no words for. It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, nor opium, nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving. It is not love’s delight, it is not bearing children, though in that there are moments like jewels. There is one taste in us that is unsatisfied. I don’t know what that taste is, but I know it is there. Life’s best gift, hasn’t some one said, is the ability to dream of a better life....”

The green hat crushed recklessly against the back of the chair, she stared, still and absorbed, at the names that friends of long-ago had written on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her eyes glowed, glowed like an animal’s. The light of the reading-lamp on the littered table by my elbow kissed her lip, and the light kissed the faint, faint down on her lip into a few 

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