He made her come to life, no longer as a woman sitting beside a man on the top deck of the Bristol Mail but as an absolute ruler of the weather; he made her come alive in her own domain. She could plainly feel that he was granting her his own world. She realized that when he was mute and unable to move (as he was yesterday), when he was apart from her (yesterday, for example, when she didn’t know him yet, when he was keeping quiet up here, and she was all alone down below in the coupé), when he wasn’t in touch with anyone else, he still saw the world in the same way he was seeing it and naming it now. He could summon the rain for himself alone.

Now he’d summoned the rain for himself and for her. He was enabling her to share his private world, which, in a completely natural way, became her world. Her own world, so private to her that she often blushed at everything this man seemed to know about her: the whole of her secret life. She remembered rash impulses, from her girlhood, that had never escaped the confines of her heart, and here, he—a man unknown to her yesterday—was talking to her about them.

Be gone, smell of rain. Go back underground, stored-up reservoir of showers.

Look: The marshes rose up. She could see through the waters, as though she were looking through colored glass. The wool of the fields wrapped itself around her inflated dreams of chivalry. The autumn meadows carpeted all the childhood rooms where she’d lain in bed with fever. The forests, the woods, the groves, the big shade trees—torn from the ground by their resident flocks of birds—were flying around her, like the shawls they wrapped her with when they left on holidays, in the middle of the night, in her grandfather’s dogcart; it even seemed to her that a few little clumps of that soil that clings to tree roots had fallen onto her dress. She made a motion to brush them away with her hand. At last, when they reached the midday stopover, as she set foot on the ground, she said, “I beg of you, give me your arm, please, I am drunk.”

They ate in silence, at the same table.

“My God,” she said, “you’ve gone very pale all of a sudden. Behind your beard, you look as if you’re made of wax!”

He’d just been thinking that he had no one in the world but her. He looked at her, without answering. She thought: I was wrong to talk to him about his paleness. He must have one of those Oriental fevers that recur in fits and starts. He might have to recover at an inn. I could take care of him. He thought: She’s here, but she can leave. She’ll go her own way, if not today, then tomorrow. Maybe I’m going to lose her. . . . Why say “maybe”? Without a doubt, I’m going to lose her.