While I was making myself ready to take advantage of this long
expected moment, and to surrender myself to the impression of Gilberte
which I had prepared beforehand but could no longer find in my head, to an
extent which would enable me, during the long hours which I must spend
alone, to be certain that it was indeed herself whom I had in mind, that
it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually making grow, as a book
grows when one is writing it, she threw me a ball; and, like the idealist
philosopher whose body takes account of the external world in the reality
of which his intellect declines to believe, the same self which had made
me salute her before I had identified her now urged me to catch the ball
that she tossed to me (as though she had been a companion, with whom I had
come to play, and not a sister-soul with whom my soul had come to be
limited), made me, out of politeness, until the time came when she had to
I go, address a thousand polite and trivial remarks to her, and so
prevented me both from keeping a silence in which I might at last have
laid my hand upon the indispensable, escaped idea, and from uttering the
words which might have made that definite progress in the course of our
love on which I was always obliged to count only for the following
afternoon.
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