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Rh He just nodded, to say yes, and pressed her to him, lifted her up, took her close to him on his knees, with the caress of an embryo man. She closed her eyes on her son’s breast. She felt so weary with her depression that she could have remained lying there. It was as though the illusion was beginning to crumble to pieces, like a dear house of sympathy from which sympathy had shown itself to be absent.

“Don’t let Grandmamma notice anything,” she said, softly.

He promised.

She wanted to leave the old woman her happiness in her illusion, the illusion of that dear house of sympathy. Her own illusion was crumbling. And yet she thought that she was exaggerating, making too much of it, because a wretched boy had given her child pain:

“That’s no reason why they should all be like that,” she thought.

And she once more summoned to her mind the illusion of that great, dear house of sympathy for which she had yearned in her lonely exile.

“Come, Mamma, let’s go out.”

She released him slowly, smiled through her tears, as she rose from his lap and went to change her things:

“How small we all are!” she thought. “What small creatures we are and what small souls we have! Is that life? Or is there something different?”