But in
the address on the pneumatic message--which, only yesterday, was nothing,
was merely a 'little blue' that I had written, and, after a messenger had
delivered it to Gilberte's porter and a servant had taken it to her in her
room, had become a thing without value or distinction, one of the 'little
blues' that she had received in the course of the day--I had difficulty in
recognising the futile, straggling lines of my own handwriting beneath the
circles stamped on it at the post-office, the inscriptions added in pencil
by a postman, signs of effectual realisation, seals of the external world,
violet bands symbolical of life itself, which for the first time came to
espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice my dream.
And there was another day on which she said to me: "You know, you may call
me 'Gilberte'; in any case, I'm going to call you by your first name. It's
too silly not to." Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more
formal '_vous_,' and, when I drew her attention to this, smiled, and
composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put into the
grammar-books of foreign languages with no other object than to teach us
to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name.
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