* * * * *

I have shut myself upstairs and played patience.  The questions I put to the cards come from that casket of memories the seven keys of which I believed I had long since thrown into the sea.  A wretched form of amusement!  But the piano makes me feel sad, and there is nothing else to do.

Malthe’s letter is still intact.  I wander around it like a mouse round a trap of which it suspects the danger.  My heart meanwhile yearns to know what words he uses.

He and I belong to each other for the rest of our lives.  We owe that to my wisdom.  If he never sees me, he will never be able to forget me.

* * * * *

How could I suppose it for a single moment!  There is no possibility of remaining alone with oneself!  No degree of seclusion, nor even life in a cell, would suffice.  Strong as is the call of freedom, the power of memory is stronger; so that no one can ever choose his society at will.  Once we have lived with our kind, and become filled with the knowledge of them, we are never free again.

A sound, a scent—­and behold a person, a scene, or a destiny, rises up before us.  Very often the phantoms that come thronging around me are those of people whose existence is quite indifferent to me.  But they appear all the same—­importunate, overbearing, inevitable.

We may close our doors to visitors in the flesh; but we are forced to welcome these phantoms of the memory; to notice them and converse with them without reserve.

People become like books to me.  I read them through, turn the pages lightly, annotate them, learn them by heart.  Sometimes I am at fault; I see them in a new light.  Things that were not clear to me become plain; what was apparently incomprehensible becomes as straightforward as a commercial ledger.

It might be a fascinating occupation if I could control the entire collection of these memories; but I am the slave of those that come unbidden.  In the town it was just the reverse; one impression effaced another.  I did not realise that thought might become a burden.

* * * * *

The time draws on.  The last few days my nerves have made me feverish and restless; to-day for no special reason I opened and read all my letters, except his.  It was like reading old newspapers; yet my heart beat faster with each one I opened.

Life there in the city runs its course, only it has nothing more to do with me, and before long I shall have dropped out of memory like one long dead.  All these hidden fears, all this solicitude, these good wishes, preachings and forebodings—­there is not a single genuine feeling among the whole of them!

Margethe Ernst is the only one of my old friends who is sincere and does not let herself be carried away by false sentiment.  She writes cynically, brutally even:  “An injection of morphia would have had just the same effect on you; but everyone to his own taste.”