s well have
gone to Aniela, and said to her, "Since I love you above everything, I
pledge myself to love you no longer."

There is some terrible mistake in this. I had truly lost my way in the
desert; no wonder that I saw a Fata Morgana.

18 August.

Yesterday I felt oppressed and troubled by various thoughts. I could
not sleep. I left off plunging into the depths of pessimism, and
instead of that began to think of Aniela and call her image before my
eyes. This always soothes me. My imagination strained to the utmost
point brings her before me so lifelike that I fancy I could speak to
her. I recalled to memory the time I had met her first as a grown-up
girl. I saw the white, gauzy draperies studded with bunches of
violets, the bare shoulders, and the face a little too small but fresh
like a spring morning, and so original in the bold outline of the
eyebrows, the long lashes, and that soft down on either side of the
face. It seems to me as if I still heard her voice saying, "Do you not
recognize me, Leon?" I wrote at the time that her face appeared to me
like music translated into human features. There was in her at the
same time the charm of the maiden and the attraction of the woman. No
other woman ever fascinated me so strongly, and there must needs cross
my way a Circe-like Laura to lure me away from the one woman I could
love, almost my bride.

Nobody feels more than I that the words, "The spell thou hast cast
upon me lasts forever," are not a mere poetic fancy, but bitter
reality. Besides love and desire, I have for her an immense liking,
the tenderness of affection, and am drawn to her with the irresistible
force of the magnet to iron. And it cannot be otherwise, for she is
still the same Aniela, and is not changed in the least. It is the same
face of a little girl, with the charm of a woman, the same look, the
same eyelashes, brows, shoulders, and supple waist. She has now one
more charm,--that of the lost Paradise.

What a tremendous gulf between our relations in the past and those in
the present. When I think of the Aniela who was waiting, as for her
salvation, to hear from me the words, "Will you be mine?" I can
scarcely believe it to have been true. Reflecting upon that, I feel
like the ruined magnate who at one time scattered his wealth about,
dazzling the world by his splendor, and in later years lived upon
charity.

That night, when I thought about Aniela and evoked her image before my
eyes, it