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 speak. Annie was as quiet as a mouse. It seemed to her somehow curious and amusing that Prokop had once been a child and a youth and something different from the gruff and extraordinary person by the side of whom she felt herself to be so small. Now she ceased to be afraid of touching him, tying his cravat and combing his hair. And for the first time she became conscious of his thick nose, his heavy and severe lips and his sombre, bloodshot eyes. It all seemed to her extraordinarily wonderful.

And now it was her turn to speak of her life. She had already taken breath and opened her lips; but suddenly she burst out laughing. What could she say about such an insignificant life, especially to a person who had once been buried by a shell for twelve hours in the War, had been in America, and who knows what else? “I have nothing to say,” she said directly. But is not such a “nothing” as valuable as the experience of a man?

It was late in the afternoon when they set off together on a sun-warmed path across the fields. Prokop was silent, and Annie caressed the prickly heads of the wheat with her hand as she went along. She brushed him with her shoulder, lingered and stopped—and then set off again two steps in front of him, pulling at the wheat with some curious compulsion to destruction. This sun-lit solitude finally weighed her down and made her nervous. We shouldn’t have come here, they both thought secretly, and in this oppressive disharmony they dragged out a shallow, fragmentary conversation. Finally here was their objective, a little chapel