someday have to earn her bread.

All at once, from amidst this mass of confused, half-forgotten incidents,
Pierre was conscious of the rise of a vivid vision. Ill-health, he
remembered, had again compelled him to take a holiday. He had just
completed his twenty-fourth year, he was greatly behindhand, having so
far only secured the four minor orders; but on his return a
sub-deaconship would be conferred on him, and an inviolable vow would
bind him for evermore. And the Guersaints' little garden at Neuilly,
whither he had formerly so often gone to play, again distinctly appeared
before him. Marie's couch had been rolled under the tall trees at the far
end of the garden near the hedge, they were alone together in the sad
peacefulness of an autumnal afternoon, and he saw Marie, clad in deep
mourning for her mother and reclining there with legs inert; whilst he,
also clad in black, in a cassock already, sat near her on an iron garden
chair. For five years she had been suffering. She was now eighteen, paler
and thinner than formerly, but still adorable with her regal golden hair,
which illness respected. He believed from what he had heard that she was
destined to remain infirm, condemned never to become a woman, stricken
even in her sex. The doctors, who failed to agree respecting her case,
had abandoned her. Doubtless it was she who told him these things that
dreary afternoon, whilst the yellow withered leaves rained upon them.
However, he could not remember the words that they had spoken; her pale
smile, her young face, still so charming though already dimmed by
regretfulness for life, alone remained present with him. But he realised
that she had evoked the far-off day of their parting, on that same spot,
behind the hedge flecked with sunlight; and all that was already as
though dead--their tears, their embrace, their promise to find one
another some day with a certainty of happiness. For although they had
found one another again, what availed it, since she was but a corpse, and