armly shook his proffered
hand.

Nathanael had completely forgotten that there was a Clara in the world,
whom he had once loved--and his mother and Lothair. They had all
vanished from his mind; he lived for Olimpia alone. He sat beside her
every day for hours together, rhapsodising about his love and sympathy
enkindled into life, and about psychic elective affinity[10]--all of
which Olimpia listened to with great reverence. He fished up from the
very bottom of his desk all the things that he had ever written--poems,
fancy sketches, visions, romances, tales, and the heap was increased
daily with all kinds of aimless sonnets, stanzas, canzonets. All these
he read to Olimpia hour after hour without growing tired; but then he
had never had such an exemplary listener. She neither embroidered, nor
knitted; she did not look out of the window, or feed a bird, or play
with a little pet dog or a favourite cat, neither did she twist a piece
of paper or anything of that kind round her finger; she did not
forcibly convert a yawn into a low affected cough--in short, she sat
hour after hour with her eyes bent unchangeably upon her lover's face,
without moving or altering her position, and her gaze grew more ardent
and more ardent still. And it was only when at last Nathanael rose
and kissed her lips or her hand that she said, "Ach! Ach!" and then
"Good-night, dear." Arrived in his own room, Nathanael would break out
with, "Oh! what a brilliant--what a profound mind! Only you--you alone
understand me." And his heart trembled with rapture when he reflected
upon the wondrous harmony which daily revealed itself between his own
and his Olimpia's character; for he fancied that she had expressed in
respect to his works and his poetic genius the identical sentiments
which he himself cherished deep down in his own heart in respect to the
same, and even as if it was his own heart's voice speaking to him. And
it must indeed have been so; for Olimpia never uttered any other words
than those already mentioned. And when Nathanael himself in his clear
and sober moments, as, for instance, directly after waking in a
morning, thought about her utter passivity and taciturnity, he only
said, "What are words--but words? The glance of her heavenly eyes says
more than any tongue of earth. And how can, anyway, a child of heaven
accustom herself to the narrow circle which the exigencies of a
wretched mundane life demand?"

Professor Spalanzani appeared to b