Page:The Best continental short stories of and the yearbook of the continental short story 1924-25.pdf/67



ERY often, in different places, and in the presence of a variety of circumstances, have I had occasion to reflect upon the love between friend and friend, the love between lovers, and the love between husband and wife. There can be no doubt, because proofs of the fact are common, that man, and even the most inconceivably malicious of men, is at bottom so strange that he can really manifest genuine love. It is even true that he sometimes loves without asking anything whatever in return.

It is also an unquestionable fact that the soldiers of numberless armies, leaving for the front to encounter incredible sufferings, have been loved, every one, by some human soul. And from the vast assembly of human hearts who thus loved them has arisen to the skies, as it were, an immense cloud made up of prayers and wailing. In precisely the same way are beloved the infants who are born to swell the number of earth’s human beings, and those who quit the world and descend to the grave. As for us, as for you and me, we are just like every one else.

It was toward noon, at the moment when workmen whose work prevents them from going home to their meal are looking out for convenient stairways, lumber piles and heaps of bricks, where they may sit at ease and eat their lunch full in the public eye. Women workers make haste to eat before the food gets cold. They carefully steer their course through the throngs about them and bear with the greatest solicitude their lunch-baskets or napkins. Napkins are carried by their four corners and the women are very careful to avoid all awkwardness, to jostle nobody, to keep from slipping, and to maintain their soup, milk and coffee right side up.

One of these women is holding her child on one arm and her lunch-basket on the other. Today she has cooked for the meal the favorite dishes preferred by her husband.