How utterly unprofitable my life is!  These continual searchings of my mind are leading me into the desert.  And it might have been so different!  I am surprised that the memory of Aniela should be still so fresh and green.  Why is it that I never dream of walking arm-in-arm with Laura?  And since I come to mention her name, I add inwardly, “Perdition upon the memory!” I often think I have been holding happiness by both wings, and let it escape.

2 June.

I never was so amazed in my life as to-day, in regard to Lukomski.  We went together to the museum on the Capitol.  When near the Venus, he surprised me by saying he preferred the Neapolitan Psyche by Praxiteles, as being more spiritual.  A strange confession from a sculptor like him; but a greater surprise was in store for me near “The Dying Gladiator.”  Lukomski looked at him for nearly half an hour, then said, through clenched teeth, as he does when deeply moved,—­“I have heard it said a hundred times that he has a Slavonic face, but really the likeness is wonderful.  My brother has a farm,—­Koslowka, near Sierpiec.  There was one of the laborers, Michna, who was drowned driving horses through the water.  I tell you it is exactly the same face.  I come here very often for an hour, because I feel a longing to look at it.”

I could not believe my ears, and was surprised the roof of the Capitol did not come down on our heads.  Sierpiec, Koslowka, Michna, here in the world of the antique, of classic forms! and from whose lips?—­from those of Lukomski!  I saw at once, peeping out from beneath the sculptor, the man.  And that is the artist, I thought,—­that the Roman, the Greek!  You come here to look at the Gladiator, not so much for the sake of the form, as because he reminds you of Michna from Koslowka.  I begin to understand now the taciturnity and melancholy.  Lukomski evidently guessed my thoughts; for, the mystic eyes looking straight before him, he began in a broken voice to reply to my unuttered words:  “Rome is well enough,—­to live in, but not to die in!  I am getting on fairly well,—­no right to complain.  I remain here because I must; but the longing for the old place tears me like all the devils.  When the dogs bark at night in the garden, I fancy the sound comes from the village; and I feel as if I could scratch the walls.  I should go mad if I did not go there once a year.  I am going now, shortly, because I cannot breathe here any longer.”

He put his hand to his throat, and screwed up his mouth as if to whistle, to hide the trembling of the lips.  It was almost an explosion,—­the more astounding, as it was so unexpected.  A sudden emotion seized me at the thought of the vast difference between me and such men as he and Sniatynski.  Even now I think of it with a certain apprehension.  There are vast horizons out of my reach.  What an intensity of feeling there is in those men!  They may be happy or wretched with it; but how immeasurably