But is it quite just to call her a pagan? because, I say again, whether sincere or not, she shares my sorrows and tries to soothe them.  We talk for hours about my father, and I have often seen tears in her eyes.  Since she found out that music acts soothingly upon my mind, she plays for hours, and often until late at night.  Sometimes I sit in my room in the dark, look absently at the sea riddled by a silver network, and listen to the sounds of her music mingling with the splashing of the waves.  I listen until I feel half distracted, half sleepy,—­until in sleep I forget the real life, with all its sorrows.

29 March.

I do not even feel inclined to write every day.  We are reading together the Divina Commedia,—­or rather, its last part.  There was a time when I felt more attracted by the awful plasticity of the Inferno.  Now I like to plunge into the luminous mist, peopled with still more luminous spirits, of the Dantesque heaven.  At times it seems as if amid all that radiance I see the dear, familiar features, and my sorrow becomes almost sweet to me.  I never before understood the exceeding beauty of heaven.  Never has human mind taken such a lofty flight, encompassed such greatness, or borrowed such a slice from infinity as in this sublime, immortal poem.  The day before yesterday and the two days following, we read it together in the boat.  We usually go out a long distance, and when the sea is quite still I furl the sail; and we read, rocked by the waves,—­or rather, she reads and I listen.  Surrounded by the glories of the sunset, far from the shore, with the most beautiful woman reading to me Dante, I was under a delusion, that I had been transferred to another world.

30 March.

At times the sorrow that seemed to be lulled to sleep wakes up with renewed force.  I feel then as if I wanted to fly hence.

VILLA LAURA, 31 March.

To-day I thought a great deal about Aniela.  I have a strange feeling, as if lands and seas divided us.  It seems to me as if Ploszow were a Hyperborean island somewhere at the confines of the world.  We have delusions of that kind when personal impression takes the place of tangible reality.  It is not Aniela who is far from me, it is I who go farther and farther away from the Leon whose heart and thoughts were once so full of her.  This does not mean that my feelings for her have vanished.  By close analysis I find they have only changed in their active character.  Some weeks ago, I loved her and wanted something; I love her still, but want nothing.  My father’s death has scattered the concentration of the feelings.  It would be the same, for instance, had I begun some literary work, and some unfortunate accident interrupted the even flow of my thoughts.  But that is not all.  Not long ago, all the faculties of my mind were strung to their highest pitch; now, under the influence of a heavy sorrow, a soft atmosphere, and the gently rocking sea, they have relaxed.