The drizzle flies softly through the air. The city has disappeared. We
walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or
what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I
look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water
keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is
the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it
is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is
nothing but a sky. I have no interest in skies. But I am looking at it for
you and enjoying it through your romantic eyes."

But her romantic eyes are oblivious. They consult the rain-washed pavement
before her and nothing else. Very well, there are other and nicer skies in
her heart that she contemplates. This is an inferior sky overhead. We walk
on.

You see, I have been wrong. It is not green fields that lured the heavy
feet of this slavey. She is not a peasant Cinderella. Grief, yes, hidden
sorrow, has led her here. This is a cemetery.

It rains over the cemetery. There is silence. The white stones glisten.
They stand like beggars asking alms of the winding paths. And this blousy
one has come to be close to one of the white stones. Under one of them
lies somebody whose image still lives in her heart.

She will kneel in the wet grass and her pasty little face will blink its
dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit,
her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless
silence of trees, wind, rain and white stones.