"Do not be angry"--she thought that I was afraid, angry--"Don't be
angry. To-night, when they began to knock here, and you were still
sleeping, I suddenly understood that my husband, my children--all
these were simply temporary... I love you, very much"--she found my
hand and shook it with the same new, unfamiliar grasp--"but do you
hear how they are knocking there? They are knocking, and something
seems to be falling, some kind of walls seem to be falling--and it is
so spacious, so wide, so free. It is night now, and yet it seems to
me that the sun is shining. I am thirty years of age, and I am old
already, and yet it seems to me that I am only seventeen, and that I
love some one with my first love--a great, boundless love."

"What a night!" I said. "It is as if the city were no more. You
are right, I have also forgotten how old I am."

"They are knocking, and it sounds to me like music, like singing of
which I have always dreamed--all my life. And I did not know whom it
was that I loved with such a boundless love, which made me feel like
crying and laughing and singing. There is freedom--do not take my
happiness away, let me die with those who are working there, who are
calling the future so bravely, and who are rousing the dead past from
its grave."

"There is no such thing as time."

"What do you say?"

"There is no such thing as time. Who are you? I did not know you.
Are you a human being?"