is in danger. The deuce take the money! All I possess may
perish, rather than that Aniela should have a moment of anxiety. I
must get at the bottom of the mystery to-morrow. I am quite sure it
has to do with Kromitzki; but what can he have done? He has not sold
another Gluchow, for the simple reason that there is not another to
sell.

Berlin, 5 September.

I am at Berlin, because escaping from Vienna I had to go somewhere. I
could not go to Ploszow, because she will be there. I was so convinced
that no human power could tear me from her that the very idea of
separation seemed to me a wild impossibility. But no! It is always the
unexpected that happens, for I have gone away, and everything is at
an end. I am at Berlin. I feel as if I had an engine in my head, the
wheels of which keep whirring incessantly. This hurts me; but I am
not mad. I know everything and remember everything. My physician was
right; it is only weak heads that come to grief. Besides, it could not
happen to me, because insanity sometimes means happiness.

6 September.

Yet at times I fancy that my brain is bursting bounds. What is there
more natural than that a married woman should have children? But to me
that natural order seems so monstrous that it well-nigh maddens me.
Yet a thing cannot be at the same time in the order of nature and
a monstrosity. No brain can withstand that. What does it mean? I
understand that those whom fate means to crush are crushed by some
great, overwhelming calamity. With me it is different. I am rent
asunder by an ordinary, natural event,--and the more natural, the more
terrible it is. One contradicts the other. She is not responsible,--I
understand that because I am not mad. She is still virtuous, and yet
I could have sooner forgiven her any other crime. And I cannot, God
knows I cannot forgive you, because I loved you so much. And believe
me, there is not another woman in the whole world I scorn so much as I
scorn you. For, after all, it comes to this: you had two lovers, one
for Platonic love and the other for matrimonial love. There is in me a
wild desire to laugh, and at the same time to dash my head against the
wall. I had not foreseen that a way could be found to tear me from
you; and yet there is one, and it has proved effective.

8 September

When I come to think that all is at an end between us, and that I have
left her forever, I can scarcely believe it. There is no Aniela for me
any more. Then w