Every moment people were passing close by us, singly, in two and threes;
the inhabitants of that end of the town where life goes on unadorned by
grace or splendour; they passed us in their shabby garments, with sallow
faces, haggard, anxious or weary, or simply without expression, in an
unsmiling sombre stream not made up of lives but of mere unconsidered
existences whose joys, struggles, thoughts, sorrows and their very hopes
were miserable, glamourless, and of no account in the world. And when
one thought of their reality to themselves one's heart became oppressed.
But of all the individuals who passed by none appeared to me for the
moment so pathetic in unconscious patience as the girl standing before
me; none more difficult to understand. It is perhaps because I was
thinking of things which I could not ask her about.
In fact we had nothing to say to each other; but we two, strangers as we
really were to each other, had dealt with the most intimate and final of
subjects, the subject of death. It had created a sort of bond between
us. It made our silence weighty and uneasy.
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