ght, comparing
her to the Aniela of the past. I could not get enough of this
exchange of memories with reality. There is something so irresistibly
attractive in Aniela that had I never seen her before, if she were
among thousands of beautiful women and I were told to choose, I should
go straight to her and say: "This one and no other." She answers
so exactly to the feminine prototype every man carries in his
imagination. I fancy she must have noticed that I watched and admired
her.

I left at dusk. I was so shaken by the sensations of the day, so
utterly different from all my preconceived ideas, that I had lost the
power of dissecting my thoughts. I expected to find Pani Kromitska,
and found Aniela; I put it down once more. God only knows what will
be the consequence of this for us both. When I think of it I have the
sensation of a great happiness, and also a slight disappointment. And
yet I was right, theoretically, in expecting those psychical changes
which necessarily take place in a woman after she is married, and I
might easily be led to think she would show in some way that she was
glad she had not chosen me. There is not another woman who would have
denied herself that satisfaction of vanity. And as I know myself, my
sensitiveness and my nerves, I could take my oath on it, that if such
had been the case I should have been now full of bitterness, anger,
and sarcasm,--but cured. In the mean while, things have fallen
out differently,--altogether differently. She is a being of such
unfathomable goodness and simplicity that the measure I have for
goodness is not large enough for her.

What will happen next, what will happen to me or to her, I cannot say.
My life might have run on quietly towards that ocean where all life is
absorbed,--now it may run like a cataract down to a precipice. Let it
be so. At the worst I can only be a little more unhappy, that is
all. Until now I have not been lying on a bed of roses, with that
consciousness of my useless life continually before me.

I do not remember; somebody, was it my father? said that there must
always be something growing within us, that such is the law of
nature. It is true. Even in the desert the forces of life hidden in
the depth bring forth palms in the oasis.

21 April.

I live nominally at Warsaw, but have spent four consecutive days at
Ploszow. Pani Celina is better, but the cleric Latyzs died the day
before yesterday. Doctor Chwastowski says it was a s