18 August.

Yesterday I felt oppressed and troubled by various thoughts.  I could not sleep.  I left off plunging into the depths of pessimism, and instead of that began to think of Aniela and call her image before my eyes.  This always soothes me.  My imagination strained to the utmost point brings her before me so lifelike that I fancy I could speak to her.  I recalled to memory the time I had met her first as a grown-up girl.  I saw the white, gauzy draperies studded with bunches of violets, the bare shoulders, and the face a little too small but fresh like a spring morning, and so original in the bold outline of the eyebrows, the long lashes, and that soft down on either side of the face.  It seems to me as if I still heard her voice saying, “Do you not recognize me, Leon?” I wrote at the time that her face appeared to me like music translated into human features.  There was in her at the same time the charm of the maiden and the attraction of the woman.  No other woman ever fascinated me so strongly, and there must needs cross my way a Circe-like Laura to lure me away from the one woman I could love, almost my bride.

Nobody feels more than I that the words, “The spell thou hast cast upon me lasts forever,” are not a mere poetic fancy, but bitter reality.  Besides love and desire, I have for her an immense liking, the tenderness of affection, and am drawn to her with the irresistible force of the magnet to iron.  And it cannot be otherwise, for she is still the same Aniela, and is not changed in the least.  It is the same face of a little girl, with the charm of a woman, the same look, the same eyelashes, brows, shoulders, and supple waist.  She has now one more charm,—­that of the lost Paradise.

What a tremendous gulf between our relations in the past and those in the present.  When I think of the Aniela who was waiting, as for her salvation, to hear from me the words, “Will you be mine?” I can scarcely believe it to have been true.  Reflecting upon that, I feel like the ruined magnate who at one time scattered his wealth about, dazzling the world by his splendor, and in later years lived upon charity.

That night, when I thought about Aniela and evoked her image before my eyes, it suddenly occurred to me that we had no portrait of her, and a strong desire seized me to have her likeness.  I grasped at the idea with enthusiasm, and it made me feel so happy that it finally drove all sleep from my eyes.  “I shall have you,” I said; “I shall be able to look at you at any time, kiss your hands, your eyes, your lips; and you will not be able to prevent it.”  I began at once to think how it might be done.  I could not go and say to Aniela, “Have your portrait painted, and I will defray the expenses;” but with my aunt I could always do what I liked, and a hint will be enough to make her wish for Aniela’s portrait.  At Ploszow she has a whole collection of family portraits, which are her pride, and my desperation, as some of them