Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/105

Rh they strike me so forcibly now? And why do I feel so strange? . . ."

The wind suddenly cried aloud, like the martyred soul of some monster; and she started, but forced herself to concentrate her thoughts:

"He can't know," she thought. "What can he know, to make him speak deliberately . . . of those childish years? No, he can't know; and I felt that he did not know, that he was only speaking in order to compare himself with Addie to Addie's mother, in a burst of confidence. He is a man of impulses, I think . . . No, there was nothing at the back of his words . . . and he knows nothing, nothing of my own early years . . . We are almost the same age: he is four years older than Henri. When he was a child, I was a child. When he was dreaming, I was dreaming. Does that sort of thing really exist? Or is it my fancy, some unconscious vein of poetry inside me, that is making me imagine all this? . . . Hush, hush . . . it is becoming absurd! It is all very pretty and charming in children: they can have their day-dreams; and a young man and a young girl might perhaps give a thought to them afterwards, in a romantic moment; but, at my age, it all becomes absurd, utterly absurd. . . And of course it's not there: it's nothing but a chance coincidence. I won't think about it any more. . . And yet. . . I have never felt before as I do now. Oh, that feeling as if I had always been straying, blindly,