see what sort of
creature it is. Then all my previous works will have ceased to exist;
then I will bestir myself in a public way; I will come out and be the
man that I really am. You can depend on it."

Daniel had never talked to Eleanore in this way before. As she looked at
him, overcome almost by the passion of his words, and saw him standing
there so utterly fearless, so unyielding and unpitying, her breast
heaved with a sigh, and she said: "God grant that you succeed, and that
you live to enjoy the fruits of your ambition."

"It is all a matter of fate, Eleanore," he replied.

He demanded the quartette; it was sent back to him.

From then on Eleanore suppressed even the slightest sense of discontent
that arose in her heart. She felt that he needed cruelty and harshness
for his small life in order to preserve love and patience for the great
life.

Yes, she prayed to Heaven that she might leave him harsh and cruel.

XVI

"Eleanore is my wife," said Daniel every now and then; he would even
stop in the middle of the street in order to enjoy to the full, and
preserve if possible, the blessed realisation of this fact.

He always knew it. Yet when he was with Eleanore he frequently forgot
her presence. There were days when he would pass by her as though she
were some chance acquaintance.

Then there were other days when his happiness made him sceptical; he
would say: "Is it then really happiness? Am I happy? If so, why is it
that I do not feel my happiness more fervently, terribly?"

He would frequently study her form, her hands, her walk, and wish that
he had new eyes, so that he might see her anew. He went away merely in
order that he might see her better. In the night he would take a candle,
and go up to her bed: a gentle anguish seemed to disappear from her
features, his own pulse beat more rapidly. This was caused by the
flame-blue of her eyes.

There is a point where the most demure and chaste woman differs in no
wise from a prostitute. This is the source of infinite grief to the man
who loves. No woman suspects or can understand it.

It was one day while he was brooding and musing and quarrelling without
definite reason, in the arms of his beloved, that the profound,
melancholy motif in the first movement of his symphony in D minor came
to him. This symphony gradually grew into the great vision of his life,
and, many years later, one of his women admirers gave it th