This was scarcely permissible in a novel.  But the scene pleased my mother, and when I again brought the lovers together in the warm stillness of the Egyptian night, and perceived that the flood of iambics was once more sweeping me along, I gave free course to the creative spirit and the pen, and the next morning the result was the same.

I then took Julius Hammer into my confidence, and he thought that I had given expression to the overflowing emotion of two loving young hearts in a very felicitous and charming way.

While my friends were enjoying themselves in ball-rooms or exciting society, Fate still condemned me to careful seclusion in my mother’s house.  But when I was devoting myself to the creation of my Nitetis, I envied no man, scarcely even a god.

So this novel approached completion.  It had not deprived me of an hour of actual working time, yet the doubt whether I had done right to venture on this side flight into fairer and better lands during my journey through the department of serious study was rarely silent.

At the beginning of the third volume I ventured to move more freely.

Yet when I went to Lepsius, the most earnest of my teachers, to show him the finished manuscript, I felt very anxious.  I had not said even a word in allusion to what I was doing in the evening hours, and the three volumes of my large manuscript were received by him in a way that warranted the worst fears.  He even asked how I, whom he had believed to be a serious worker, had been tempted into such “side issues.”

This was easy to explain, and when he had heard me to the end he said:  “I might have thought of that.  You sometimes need a cup of Lethe water.  But now let such things alone, and don’t compromise your reputation as a scientist by such extravagances.”

Yet he kept the manuscript and promised to look at the curiosity.

He did more.  He read it through to the last letter, and when, a fortnight later; he asked me at his house to remain after the others had left, he looked pleased, and confessed that he had found something entirely different from what he expected.  The book was a scholarly work, and also a fascinating romance.

Then he expressed some doubts concerning the space I had devoted to the Egyptians in my first arrangement.  Their nature was too reserved and typical to hold the interest of the unscientific reader.  According to his view, I should do well to limit to Egyptian soil what I had gained by investigation, and to make Grecian life, which was familiar to us moderns as the foundation of our aesthetic perceptions, more prominent.  The advice was good, and, keeping it in view, I began to subject the whole romance to a thorough revision.

Before going to Wildbad in the summer of 1863 I had a serious conversation with my teacher and friend.  Hitherto, he said, he had avoided any discussion of my future; but now that I was so decidedly convalescing, he must tell me that even the most industrious work as a “private scholar,” as people termed it, would not satisfy me.  I was fitted for an academic career, and he advised me to keep it in view.  As I had already thought of this myself, I eagerly assented, and my mother was delighted with my resolution.