The Woman Destroyed

Sadness can be wept away. But the impatience of delight—it is not so easy to get rid of that.

Whatever the photograph album may say to the contrary, the pictures of the young André conform to his present-day face: my eyes attribute no age to him. A long life filled with laughter, tears, quarrels, embraces, confessions, silences, and sudden impulses of the heart: and yet sometimes it seems that time has not moved by at all. The future still stretches out to infinity.

Sometimes I don’t tell André about my moods, sorrows, unimportant anxieties; and no doubt he has his little secrets too; but on the whole there is nothing we do not know about one another.

Sadness can be wept away. But the impatience of delight—it is not so easy to get rid of that.

How long would he have gone on cheerfully doing without me?

And I still love life too much for the idea of death to be a consolation.

Had he loved me as I loved him?

But could he fill this emptiness within me?

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end.

He loved me; I could have no doubt of that. Did anything else matter?