ildhood;--these
last months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha,
of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me. She behaved
with a certain new consciousness and distance towards me after my
brother's death; and I too was under a double constraint--that of
delicacy towards my brother's memory and of anxiety as to the impression
my abrupt words had left on her mind. But the additional screen this
mutual reserve erected between us only brought me more completely under
her power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick
enough. So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain
for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the
breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond
to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie
between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and
our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last
possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment: we should have
a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within
the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition
of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except
one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but
in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of
debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like
bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it,
and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our
impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea
of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the
irritability of our muscles.

Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions
were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other minds
around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown to-day--as a single
hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the
cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of my
nature, welled out in this one narrow channel.

And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever quitting her
tone of _badinage_ and playful superiority, she intoxicated me with the
sense that I was necessary to her, that she was never at ease, unless I
was near her, subm