One summer day I flung the windows wide open. It seemed to me that the garden had entered the living room. I was twenty-two and felt nature in my every fibre. The day was beautiful. A gentle sun, as if it had risen that very instant, covered the flowers and grass. It was four in the afternoon. All around, silence.

I looked back at the room, soothed by the calm of those moments. I wanted to tell him:

“It seems to me that this is the very first hour, but afterward, no more will ever follow.”

Mentally, I heard him reply:

“That’s merely an indefinable sentimental tendency, mixed up with modish literature, very subjectivist. From which arises this confusion of sentiments, which doesn’t truly have any substance of its own, except for your psychological condition, very common in unwed ladies your age…”

I tried to explain it to him, to resist him … Not a single argument. I turned back desolate, looked at his sad face and we were silent.

That was when I had that terrible thought: “Either I destroy him or he’ll destroy me.”

I had to prevent at all costs that analytical tendency, which ended up reducing the world to mere quantitative elements, from affecting me. I had to react. I wanted to see whether the grayness of his words could cloud my twenty-two years and the bright summer afternoon. I made up my mind, ready to start fighting that very moment. I turned to him, placed my hands on the windowsill, narrowed my eyes and hissed:

“This seems to me the very first hour and also the last!”

Silence. Outside, the indifferent breeze.

He lifted his eyes to me, raised his languid hand and stroked his hair. Then he started tracing his nail over the checked pattern on the tablecloth.

I closed my eyes, let my arms drop alongside my body. My lovely and luminous twenty-two years… I ordered coffee with plenty of sugar.