A young archæologist, Norbert Hanold, has discovered at Rome, in a collection of antiques, a bas-relief which attracts him so exceptionally that he is delighted to be able to get an excellent plaster-cast of it which he can hang up in his study in a German university-city and study with interest. The relief represents a mature young girl walking. She has gathered up her voluminous gown slightly, so that her sandalled feet become visible. One foot rests wholly on the ground; the other is raised to follow and touches the ground only with the tips of the toes while sole and heel rise almost perpendicularly. The unusual and especially charming walk represented had probably aroused the artist’s attention, and now, after so many centuries, captivates the eye of our archæological observer. This interest of the hero in the described bas-relief is the basic psychological fact of our story. It is not immediately explicable. “Doctor Norbert Hanold, docent of archæology, really found in the relief nothing noteworthy for his science.” (_Gradiva_, p. 14.) “He could not explain what quality in it had aroused his attention; he knew only that he had been attracted by something and this effect of the first view had remained unchanged since then,” but his imagination does not cease to be occupied with the relief. He finds in it a “sense of present time,” as if the artist had fixed the picture on the street “from life.” He confers upon the girl represented walking a name, Gradiva, “the girl splendid in walking,” spins a yarn that she is the daughter of a distinguished family, perhaps of a “patrician ædile, whose office was connected with the worship of Ceres,” and is on the way to the temple of the goddess. Then it is repulsive to him to place her in the mob of a metropolis; rather he convinces himself that she is to be transported to Pompeii, and is walking there somewhere on the peculiar stepping-stones which have been excavated; these made a dry crossing possible in rainy weather, and yet also afforded passage for chariot-wheels. The cut of her features seems to him Greek, her Hellenic ancestry unquestionable. All of his science of antiquity gradually puts itself at the service of this or other fancies connected with the relief.