I left the post office, stood on the pavement, my arms hung limp at my sides. What dreadful legerdemain! I was no longer sure of the ground under my feet, nor of the calendar, nor even of my own name. Lewis had written and letters were arriving; therefore, his letter had to be here. It was not here. It was too soon to cable, 'No letter. Worried'; too soon to burst into tears; it was, after all, merely a normal delay; I wasn't permitted the refuge of unbounded despair; I had figured wrong, that's all, and one rarely dies from a mistake in calculation. And yet, while I dined with Robert on a flowery terrace overhanging the sea, I was certainly not alive. He spoke to me of Nadine who was going out assiduously with Henri; I answered; we drank our wine, on the label a moustachioed gentleman smiled at us; the lights of the fishing boats shimmered on the sea; all around us hung a powerful fragrance of romantic plants; nothing was missing, anywhere, except black marks on a yellow sheet of paper, and they would have been the symbol of an absence; the absence of an absence, which is really nothing, which devours everything.