The human soul, like the bee, extracts sweetness even from bitter herbs.  The most unhappy wretch still tries to squeeze out a little happiness from his woes, and the merest shadow and pretext will serve his turn.  Sometimes I think that this intense longing for happiness is one proof more that happiness is awaiting us in another world.  I am convinced also that pessimism was invented as a comfort to satisfy a want, sum up all human misery, and put it into a philosophic formula.  It satisfies our thirst for truth and knowledge, and happiness itself is nothing but satisfied craving.  Perhaps love in itself is such a source of happiness that even a clouded love like ours is interwoven with golden rays.  Such a ray fell on our path to-day.  I had not expected it, as I had not expected that a man whose desires are without limits could be satisfied with so little.

We had scarcely read our letters when Pani Celina, who is now able to walk without help, came towards us with a footstool for Aniela.

“Oh mamma!” cried out Aniela, in a shocked voice; “You ought not to do that.”

“And did you not yourself nurse me night and day when I was ill?”

I took the footstool from Pani Celina’s hands, and kneeling down before Aniela, I waited until she had put her little feet upon it; and kneeling thus before her for a second filled me with happiness for the whole day.  It is a fact.  A very poor man lives upon crumbs, and smiles gratefully—­through tears.

6 July.

I have a crippled heart, but it is capable of love.  It is only now I fully understand what Sniatynski meant.  If I were not a man out of joint, without an even-balanced mind, poisoned by scepticism, criticism of myself, and criticism of criticism, if my love were in harmony with law and principles, I should have found in Aniela the dogma of my life, and other dogmas, other beliefs, would have come to me in course of time.  Yet I do not know; perhaps I could not love otherwise than crookedly; and in this lies my incapacity for life.  In short, that which ought to have been my health and salvation has become my disease and damnation.  Strange to say, there was no lack of warnings.  It almost seems as if people had foreseen what would befall me.  I remember constantly the words Sniatynski wrote to me when I was with the Davises at Peli:  “Something must always be growing within us; beware lest something should grow in you which would cause your unhappiness, and the unhappiness of those near and dear to you.”  I laughed then at the words, yet how true they were.  My father, too, spoke several times as if he had pierced the veil that hides the future.  To-day the remembrance is too late.  I know it is useless to rake up the ashes of the past, but I cannot help it.  I am sorry for myself, but more sorry still for Aniela.  She would have been a hundred times happier with me than with Kromitzki.  Supposing even I should have subjected her at first to analysis, and discovered