Alas! that indifference I compared to pure water without taste or color is only apparently colorless.  Looking more closely I perceive tiny bubbles which dim its purity.  They are my idiosyncrasies.  Everything else has left me and they remained.  I do not love anybody, have no active hatred towards any one, but am full of aversions in regard to various people.  One of these is Kromitzki.  I do not hate him because he has taken Aniela from me; I dislike him for his long, flat feet, his thick knees, lank figure, and that voice like a coffee-mill.  He was always repulsive to me, and I mention the fact now because that aversion has such a strange vitality in me.  I cannot help thinking of people who jar upon my nerves.  If only Kromitzki and Pani Celina came under that category, I might think those antipathies were hatred in the disguise of aversion.  But it is not so.  There are others who have roused at some time or other an aversion in me that clings quite as perversely to my memory.  As I cannot ascribe it to the state of my health,—­I never felt better in my life,—­I explain it in this way:  The world has robbed me of my love, time has dried up hatred, and as the living individual must feel something, I live upon what remains to me.  I must also say that he who feels and lives thus does not get a surfeit of happiness.

My former sympathies have cooled down very considerably.  To Sniatynski I have taken a dislike which no reasoning on my part can overcome.  Sniatynski has many grand qualities and is pleasantly conscious of them, which gives him, as painters express it, a certain mannerism.  I suppose it is exceedingly rare that a man who sees that his individual characteristics impress people favorably does not fall in love with his own type, and end by exaggerating it.  Sniatynski consequently has grown artificial, and for the sake of the pose sacrifices his innate delicacy; as in case of the abrupt telegram he sent to Cracow, after his mission with Aniela had failed,—­his advice to travel, which I should have done without it,—­and I received another letter from him at Christiania soon after Aniela’s wedding, written in a friendly spirit, but very abrupt and artificial.  I might give its substance as follows:  “Panna Aniela is now Pani Kromitzka,—­the thing is done; I am sorry for you; do not think the bottom is falling out of the universe; there are other things in the world of more importance, the deuce take it.  Norway must be splendid just now.  Come back soon and set to work.  Good-by,” and so forth.  I do not repeat it word for word, but such was the gist of the letter.  It impressed me unpleasantly, first because I had not asked Sniatynski to lend me his yard-measure to measure my sorrow with; secondly, I had thought him a sensible man, and supposed he understood that his “more important things” are merely empty words unless they imply feelings and inclinations that existed before.  I wanted to write to him there and then and ask him to release