At the words "taking care" Jay had turned automatically towards Lillian and read in her eyes that fixed, immutable love which was his compass.

When Faustin was there at the café conversation would always start at the top of a pyramid without any gradual ascension. It would start with the problems of form, being and becoming, physiognomics, destiny versus incident, the coming of the fungoid era, the middle brain and the tertiary moon!

Faustin talked to build. He insisted that each talk should be a complete brick to add to a careful construction. He always started to draw on the marble-top table or on the tablecloth: this is our first premise, this is our second premise, and now we will reach the third. No sooner had he made on the table the semblance of a construction than there would come into Jay's eyes an absinthe glint which was not really the drink but some layer of his being which the drink had peeled away, which was hard, cruel, mischievous. His phrases would begin to break and scatter, to run wild like a machine without springs, gushing forth from the contradictory core of him which refused all crystallizations.

It happened every time the talk approached a definite conclusion, every time some meaning was about to be extracted from confusion. It was as if he felt that any attempt at understanding were a threat to the flow of life, to his enjoyment. As if understanding would threaten the tumultuous current or arrest it.

They were eating in a small café opposite the Gare St. Lazare, a restaurant wide open on the street. They were eating on the street and it was as if the street were full of people who were eating and drinking with them.

With each mouthful Lillian swallowed, she devoured the noises of the street, the voices and the echoes they dropped, the swift glances which fell on her like pieces of lighted wick from guttering candles. She was only the finger of a whole bigger body, a body hungry, thirsty, avid.

The wine running down her throat was passing through the throat of the world. The warmth of the day was like a man's hand on her breast, the smell of the street like a man's breath on her neck. Wide open to the street like a field washed by a river.

Shouts and laughter exploded near them from the art students on their way to the Quatz' Arts Ball. Egyptians and Africans in feather and jewelry, with the sweat shining on their brown painted bodies. They ran to catch the bus and it was like a heaving sea of glistening flesh shining between colored feathers and barbaric jewelry, with the muscles swelling when they laughed.

A few of them entered the restaurant, shouting and laughing. They circled around their table, like savages dancing around a stake.

The street organ was unwinding Carmen from its roll of tinfoil voices.

The same restaurant, another summer evening; but Jay is not there. The wine has ceased passing down Lillian's throat. It has no taste. The food does not seem rich. The street is separated from the restaurant by little green bushes she had not noticed before; the noises seem far from her, and the faces remote. Everything now happens outside, and not within her own body. Everything is distant and separated. It does not flow inside of her and carry her away.