She became more silent than ever, and her silence and averted glances said more than words would have done, they spoke of habit and resignation; within her there spoke everyone who sat silently by the windows and crossed their hands in their skirts, just as within him, whom she watched with a tired eye, there lived all the idiots. All they saw was a pitiful, wretched fragment of time, without beginning or end, for a long time before and a long time to come people like themselves would linger in a street or garden to watch an old donkey or an idiot, as they watched them saying to themselves that they were watching a donkey and an idiot of all the ages, changeless and eternal as the sky and the sun, the terrifying depths of the earth, unhappiness happiness.