478
PARTISAN REVIEW
perhaps not really beautiful but somehow fascinating girl, who was
perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old but small for her age. Her
face was tanned. Her eyes? No, he did not see them. Her name?
Unknown. Her relationship to him, the dreamer? Stop, there was the
brown shoe! He saw it move, together with its twin, saw it dancing,
saw it take a dance step, a step in the Boston. Oh yes, now one knew
a lot. He must begin all over again.
Well then: in the dream he had danced with a strange, mar–
velous little girl, a child with a tanned face and brown shoes-had
not everything about her been brown? Her hair too? And her eyes?
No, he could no longer be sure-it was reasonable, it seemed pos–
sible, but it was not certain. He must stick to certainties, to what had
firm support in his memory, otherwise he would be lost. Already
he was beginning to suspect that this dream search would lead
him
far afield, that he had set out upon a long, an unending road. And at
that very instant he found another piece.
Yes, he had danced with the little one, or had wanted to dance,
or had been supposed to dance, and she had taken a series of gay,
buoyant, enchantingly formal dance steps all by herself. Or had he
after all danced with her, had she in fact not been alone? No. No,
he had not danced, he had only wanted to, or rather it had been
agreed, by him and by someone else, that he was to dance with the
little brown girl. But then the little one had after all begun to dance
alone, without him, and he had been somehow afraid of the dance
or embarrassed; it was the Boston, a dance he did not know well.
But she had begun to dance by herself, playfully, with marvelous
rhythm, her little brown shoes carefully describing the figures of
the dance on the rug. But why had he himself not danced? Or why
had he originally wanted to dance? What sort of agreement had
there been? He could not discover.
Another question presented itself: Whom had the precious
child resembled, of whom had she reminded him? For a long time
he searched in vain; again everything seemed hopeless, and for a
moment he became really impatient and irritated, again he was al–
most ready to give up. But there once more came a flash, a new
clue blazed up. The little one had resembled his beloved---oh no,
resemblance was not it, he had even been surprised that she was so
little like her, although she was her sister. Stop! Her sister? Oh now
the whole search was illuminated, took on meaning; everything was
