They harassed me so that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself
up audibly to rehearse--it was at once a fantastic relief and a
renewed despair--the manner in which I might come to the point.
I approached it from one side and the other while, in my room,
I flung myself about, but I always broke down in the monstrous
utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I said to myself
that I should indeed help them to represent something infamous,
if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case
of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known.
When I said to myself: "THEY have the manners to be silent,
and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!"
I felt myself crimson and I covered my face with my hands.
After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever, going on
volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes occurred--
I can call them nothing else--the strange, dizzy lift or swim
(I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had
nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we
might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any deepened
exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano.
Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there.
Though they were not angels, they "passed," as the French say,
causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their
addressing to their younger victims some yet more infernal message
or more vivid image than they had thought good enough for myself.
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