. . . Oh, I couldn't have told him about myself when I was a child, for it would have appeared to me as if, by telling him, I was behaving like . . . a woman offering herself! . . . But hush, hush: all this is absurd . . . for me . . . now; and I will stop thinking of it . . . But how lonely I am, sitting here . . . and how the wind howls, how the wind howls! . . . The lamps are nickering; and it's just as if hands were rattling the shutters, trying hard to open them . . . Oh, I wish those lamps wouldn't flicker so! . . . And I feel as if the windows were going to burst open and the curtains fly up in the air . . . I'm frightened. . . . Hark to the trees cracking and the branches falling . . . Hear me, O God, hear me! I'm frightened, I'm frightened . . . Is this then the first night that I see something of myself, as if I were suddenly looking back, on a dark path that lies behind me, a dark path on which all the pageant of vanity has grown dim? For it does seem as if, right at the end of the road, I saw, as in a vision, the sun; trees with great leaves and blossoms red and white; and a little fairy child, in white, with flowers in her hair, standing on a boulder, in a river, beckoning mysteriously to her brothers, who do not understand. O my God, does that sort of thing really, really exist . . . or is it only because I never, never heard the wind blow like this before? . . ."
These thoughts, these doubts, these wonderings
