"Are you then dreaming of that girl,—that Micaela, whom they have been telling me about?"
"Yes—for I loved her!"
"Ah,—and now?"
"Now I feel something else, more violent still."
"What?"
"Hate."
"For, whom?"
"For you."
"Bah! Hate is all the same a desire—!"
"Also a vengeance."
"Perhaps so, but one—remembers."
"Those remembrances are odious to me!"
"No" cried Jélaine, "you cannot have forgotten! You are not willing to confess that just those things were so beautiful. But your will cannot go so far that you can recall, without a thrill going through you, those kisses at Taormina! Ah," continued Jélaine, as if half-drunken with his own memories and. words, "I should always have expected to And you once more, on such a night and in solitude!Look, I am here, in that desert-pathway of which you know nothing. I know all, Nino—your flight, your ruin, your scene with the old Chevalier, your leaving the house there. And so is it that with a last fearful hope moving me, I have been able to come to you. For, now, as it was of old it is my duty, Nino. In yielding to our embraces—in your looks when I speak, to you—in your dreams, in your actions, in your attitudes, in your beauty above all which is the divinest form of human art—since it is life breathed into a masterpiece—in all this I have recognized the ineffaceable print of my initiation. That, you will not deny!—When you think of engaging yourself to any girl—in your evoking any girl to your help -you go against Nature and against your future. It means only unhappiness for you and for her. One does not contradict Nature and go unpunished, Nino. The future is something that we make within ourselves, as something that is only Self, blindly Self. Nino—we two should do such great things together! Two hearts that throb with the same enthusiasms, Who are trying to look out toward the same ideal—they are made to understand each other, or to die!—"
"But what if the struggle is not worth while—for me?" asked the boy, thrown into sudden trouble, already hesitant.
"Ah, that cry is the sort which comes from people who last out their lives, but do not live them! There is a difference between enduring,—living on—and living! One must fight the fight, down here below. Do you understand that? It is truth, all the same. How— 343 —
