believe my eyes, and had to look through the letters twice; then I set my hat quite on my right ear and took a two hours’ walk on the highway in the rain, without a cigar, assailed by the most conflicting sentiments—­“a prey to violent emotions,” as we are accustomed to say in romances.  I have got used to receiving my two letters from you regularly every week, and when once we have acquired the habit of a thing we look upon that as our well-won right, an injury to which enrages us.  If I only knew against whom I should direct my wrath—­against Boege, against the post-office, or against you, la chatte la plus noire, inside and out.  And why don’t you write?  Are you so exhausted with the effort you made in sending two letters at a time on Friday of last week?  Ten days have gone by since then—­time enough to rest yourself.  Or do you want to let me writhe, while you feast your eyes on my anxiety, tigress! after speaking to me in your last letters about scarlet and nervous fevers, and after I had laid such stress on my maxim of never believing in anything bad before it forces itself upon me as incontestable?  We adhere firmly to our maxims only so long as they are not put to the test; when that happens we throw them away, as the peasant did his slippers, and run off on the legs that nature gave us.  If you have the disposition to try the virtue of my maxims, then I shall never again give utterance to any of them, lest I be caught lying; for the fact is that I do really feel somewhat anxious.  With fevers in Reddis, to let ten days pass without writing is very horrible of you, if you are well.  Or can it be that you did not receive on Thursday, as usual, my letter that I mailed on Tuesday in Magdeburg, and, in your indignation at this, resolved not to write to me for another week?  If that is the state of affairs, I can’t yet make up my mind whether to scold or laugh at you.  The worst of it now is that, unless some lucky chance brings a letter from you directly to Stolp, I shall not have any before Thursday, for, as I remember it, there is no mail leaving you Saturday and Sunday, and I should have received Friday’s today.  If you have not sworn off writing altogether and wish to reply to this letter, address me at Naugard. * * *

Had another visitor, and he stayed to supper and well into the night—­my neighbor, the town-counsellor Gaertner.  People think they must call on each other Sunday evening, and can have nothing else to do.  Now that all is quiet in the night, I am really quite disturbed about you and your silence, and my imagination, or, if not that, then the being whom you do not like to have me name, shows me with scornful zeal pictures of everything that could happen.  Johanna, if you were to fall sick now, it would be terrible beyond description.  At the thought of it, I fully realize how deeply I love you, and how deeply the bond that unites us has grown into me.  I understand what you call loving much.  When I think of the possibility of separation—­and possible it is still—­I should never have been so lonely in all my dreary, lonely life.