she felt nothing. If she's thinking of me now, she thinks of me as a madman, or at least a crank . . . What is she? She has been a woman of the world, of just that world which I hate . . . What has her life been? She married a man much older than herself, out of vanity. Then a moment of passion, between her and Hans . . . What else has there been, what else is there in her? Nothing! How utterly small they all are, these people who don't think, who don't live: who exist like dolls, with dolls' brains and dolls' souls, in a dolls' world! What am I doing among them? Oh, not that I'm big; not that I am worth more than they, but, if I am to do anything—for the world—I must live among real people, different people from them . . . or I must live alone, wrapped in myself! . . . That has always been the everlasting seesaw: doing, dreaming, doing, dreaming . . . But there has never been that temptation, that beckoning towards delectable valleys of oblivion and that luxury of allowing myself to be drawn along as though by soul-magnetism, by the strange sympathy of a woman's soul! . . . Is it then so, in reality! Is it merely a mirage of love? Love has never come into my life: have I ever known what it was? Is there one woman then, only one? Can we find, even late, like this? . . . Oh, I wish that this wind would blow all this uncertainty, all these vapourings out of my head and my heart . . . and leave me strong and simple . . . to act alone,
