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But I waked up next morning feeling fresher and in better heart. I unconsciously reproached myself, indeed, with perfect sincerity¹, for a certain levity², and, as it were, superciliousness³, with which it seemed to me, recalling it, I had listened to some parts of his “confession⁴” the evening before. Supposing it had been to some extent muddled⁵, and some revelations had been, as it were, a little delirious⁶ and incoherent, he had not, of course, prepared to deliver a speech when he invited me the day before. He had simply done me a great honour in turning to me, as his one friend at such a moment, and I shall never forget his doing it. On the contrary, his confession was “touching,” though people may laugh at me for saying so, and if there were glimpses from time to time of something cynical⁷, or even something that seemed ridiculous, I was not so narrow as to be unable to understand and accept realism, which did not, however, detract from the ideal. The great point was now that I understood the man, and I even felt, and was almost vexed⁸ at feeling, that it had all turned out to be so simple: I had always in my heart set that man on a supreme⁹ pinnacle¹⁰, in the clouds, and had insisted on shrouding¹¹ his life in mystery, so that I had naturally wished not to fit the key to it so easily.

In his meeting WITH HER, however, and in the sufferings he had endured for two years, there was much that was complex. “He did not want to live under the

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