like these spun across my brain by thousands.  I felt a bitter taste in my mouth.  “You are virtuous,” I said inwardly to Aniela, “because you have no heart.  If a dog attached himself to you as I am attached, something would be due to him.  You have never shown me any indulgence, or any spark of pity; you have never confessed to me any tender feeling, and you have taken from me what you could.  If you were able, you would deprive me of your presence altogether,—­although you had the certainty that if I could not see you my eyes would perish forever.  But I begin to understand you now, begin to see that your inflexibility is so great because your heart is so small.  You are cold and unfeeling, and your virtue is nothing but an enormous egoism, that wants above everything to be left undisturbed, and for that peace is capable of sacrificing all else.”

During the whole time of breakfast I did not say a word.  When alone in my own room I held my head with both hands and with a weary, over-wrought brain, began to think again of what had happened.  My thoughts were still very bitter.  Women of narrow hearts often remain unyielding through a certain philistinism of virtue.  The first thing with them is to keep their accounts in order, like any tradesman.  They fear love, as the grocer fears street-risings, war, riots, exalted ideas, and audacious flights of fancy.  Peace at any price, because peace is good for business.  Everything that rises above the rational and commonplace standard of life is bad, and deserves the contempt of reasonable beings.  Virtue has its heights and precipices, but also its level plains.

I now struggled with the exceedingly painful question whether Aniela did not belong to that kind of commonplace virtuous women, who want to keep their accounts in order, and reject love because it reaches above the ordinary standard of their hearts and minds.  I searched in the past for proofs.  “Who knows,” I said to myself, “whether her simple ethical code is not resting upon such a foundation?” I had believed her to be one of those exceptional natures, different from all other women, inaccessible as the snowy heights of the Alps that without any slope soar straight heavenward.  And now this lofty nature considers it the most proper thing that a husband in slippers should trample on those snows.  What does it all mean?  Whenever thoughts like these crowd my brain I feel as if I were on the brink of madness; such a rage seizes me that if I could I would throw down, trample, and spit upon the forces of life, reduce the whole world to chaos and obliterate its existence.  On my journey back from Vienna I was searching for some unearthly abode where I might love Aniela even as Dante loved Beatrice.  I built it of the sufferings from which as from fire my love had risen purified, of my renunciations and sacrifices, and thought that in a superhuman, simply angelic way she would be mine, and feel that she belonged to me.  And now it came into my thoughts that it was not worth