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220 She often strove against it, but the dream was always too strong for her, enveloping her as with a multitude of languorous spring scents. It imparted a strange tenderness to her, to her fresh, round face, the face of a woman in her prime, with the strange, soft, curly hair, which the years were changing without turning grey. If he came, she awoke from that dream, but felt herself blissfully languid and faint.

"I am not a girl," she thought, now that she heard herself speak; but her fixed idea, that she was old, quite old, retreated a little way into the background.

But, though she now no longer felt so old in her dream, after her dream she thought herself ignorant. Oh, how ignorant she was! And why had she never acquired an atom of knowledge in her wasted days, in her squandered, empty years. When she was talking to Brauws—and now that he came regularly, they often talked together, long and earnestly, in the friendly twilight—she thought:

"How ignorant I am!"

She had to make an effort sometimes to follow him in the simplest things that he said. She was obliged to confess to him that she had never learnt very much. But he said that that was a good thing, that it had kept her mind fresh. She shook her head in disclaimer; she confessed that she was ignorant and stupid. He protested; but she told him