The prospect of the possible eternal separation from my beloved pricked my mechanical wits and set them tracing the consequent line by which I had been brought to this pass as to a natural result.  Had not my father succeeded in inspiring the idea that I was something more than something?  The tendency of young men is to conceive it for themselves without assistance; a prolonged puff from the breath of another is nearly sure to make them mad as kings, and not so pardonably.

I see that I might have acted wisely, and did not; but that is a speculation taken apart from my capabilities.  If a man’s fate were as a forbidden fruit, detached from him, and in front of him, he might hesitate fortunately before plucking it; but, as most of us are aware, the vital half of it lies in the seed-paths he has traversed.  We are sons of yesterday, not of the morning.  The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing.  Our future constantly reflects her to the soul.  Nor is it ever the new man of to-day which grasps his fortune, good or ill.  We are pushed to it by the hundreds of days we have buried, eager ghosts.  And if you have not the habit of taking counsel with them, you are but an instrument in their hands.

My English tongue admonishes me that I have fallen upon a tone resembling one who uplifts the finger of piety in a salon of conversation.  A man’s review of the course of his life grows for a moment stringently serious when he beholds the stream first broadening perchance under the light interpenetrating mine just now.

My seconds were young Eckart vom Hof, and the barely much older, though already famous Gregorius Bandelmeyer, a noted mathematician, a savage Republican, lean-faced, spectacled, and long, soft-fingered; a cat to look at, a tiger to touch.  Both of them were animated by detestation of the Imperial uniform.  They distrusted my skill in the management of the weapon I had chosen; for reasons of their own they carried a case of pistols to the field.  Prince Otto was attended by Count Loepel and a Major Edelsheim of his army, fresh from the garrison fortress of Mainz, gentlemen perfectly conversant with the laws of the game, which my worthy comrades were not.  Several minutes were spent in an altercation between Edelsheim and Bandelmeyer.  The major might have had an affair of his own had he pleased.  My feelings were concentrated within the immediate ring where I stood:  I can compare them only to those of a gambler determined to throw his largest stake and abide the issue.  I was not open to any distinct impression of the surrounding scenery; the hills and leafage seemed to wear an iron aspect.  My darling, my saint’s face was shut up in my heart, and with it a little inaudible cry of love and pain.  The prince declined to listen to apologies.  ’He meant to teach me that this was not a laughing matter.’  Major Edelsheim had misunderstood Bandelmeyer; no offer of an apology had been made.  A momentary human sensation of an unworthy sort beset me when I saw them standing together again, and contrasted the collectedness and good-humour of my adversary’s representative with the vexatious and unnecessary naggling of mine, the sight of whose yard-long pipe scandalized me.