if you were to drive me away, I'd follow you like
a dog and find you again."

I shall take my journal with me, and will note down every day.

* * * * *

[By the lake.]--I find it difficult to write a word.

The threshold I am obliged to cross, in order to go out into the world,
is my own gravestone.

I am equal to it.

How pleasant it was to descend toward the valley. Uncle Peter sang; and
melodies suggested themselves to me, but I did not sing. Suddenly he
interrupted himself and said:--

"In the inns you'll be my niece, won't you?"

"Yes."

"But you must call me 'uncle' when we're there?"

"Of course, dear uncle."

He kept nodding to himself for the rest of the way, and was quite happy.

We reached the inn at the landing. He drank, and I drank too, from the
same glass.

"Where are you going?" asked the hostess.

"To the capital," said he, although I had not said a word to him about
it. Then he said to me in a whisper:--

"If you intend to go elsewhere, the people needn't know everything."

I let him have his own way.

I looked for the place where I had wandered at that time. There--there
was the rock--and on it a cross, bearing in golden characters the
inscription:--

HERE PERISHED

IRMA, COUNTESS VON WILDENORT,

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST YEAR
OF HER LIFE.

_Traveler, pray for her and honor her memory_.

I never rightly knew why I was always dissatisfied, and yearning for
the next hour, the next day, the next year, hoping that it would bring
me that which I could not find in the present. It was not love, for love
does not satisfy. I desired to live in the passing moment, but could
not. It always seemed as if something were waiting for me without the
door, and calling me. What could it have been?

I know now; it was a desire to be at one with myself, to understand
myself. Myself in the world, and the world in me.

* * * * *

The vain man is the loneliest of human beings. He is constantly longing
to be seen, understood, acknowledged, admired, and loved.

I could say much on the subject, for I too was once vain. It was only in
actual solitude that I conquered the loneliness of vanity. It is enough
for me that I exist.

How far removed this is from all that is mere show.

* * * * *

Now I understand my father's last act. He did not mean