sition so
tragically."

Why? I alone in the world understand and could have answered that
question,--and that is the reason I go back to Ploszow. It is not her
position she takes tragically, but my desertion. My despair she is
aware of, the sundering of those ties that have grown dear to her from
the time when after so much suffering, so many efforts, she contrived
to change them into ideal relations. Only now I enter into her
thoughts, into her very soul. From the moment I came back to Ploszow
there arose a struggle between duty and feeling in that noble heart.
She wished to remain true to him to whom she had promised her faith,
because her spiritual nature abhors impurity and falsehood; and at the
same time she could not help being drawn to the man she had loved with
all the fresh feelings of her young heart,--all the more as the man
was near her, loved her, and was supremely unhappy. Whole months had
passed in that struggle. At last there came a moment of peace, when
the feeling had become a union of souls so pure and unearthly that
neither her modesty nor her loyalty could take exception to it. This
is the reason of her unhappiness; I am reading now her soul as an open
book,--therefore I go back.

I also now see clearly that I would not have left her if I had had a
complete certainty that her feelings would outlast all changes in her
life. The mere animal jealousy that fills my mind with rage because
another has rights over her which are denied to me would not have been
sufficient to drive me away from the one woman who is all the world to
me. But I thought that the child, even before it was born, would take
possession of her heart, draw her closer to her husband, and blot me
out of her heart and life forever.

I do not delude myself even now, for I know that I shall not be to
her what I have been, nor what I might have been but for the combined
forces of circumstances. I might have been the dearest and only one
for her, attaching her to life and happiness; now it will be quite
different. But as long as there is a glimmering spark of feeling for
me I will not leave her, because I cannot; I have nowhere to go.

Therefore I return; I shall nurse that spark, fan it into life again,
and get some warmth from it for myself. I am reading again my aunt's
words: "If you only knew how she asks after you day by day, whether a
letter has arrived, and if you were well, when you will be going, and
how long you mean to stop a