The suspense, in which the author of _Gradiva_ has kept us up to this point, mounts here, for a moment, to painful confusion. Not only because our hero has apparently lost his equilibrium, but also because, confronted with the appearance of Gradiva, who was formerly a plaster-cast and then a creation of imagination, we are lost. Is it a hallucination of our deluded hero, a “real” ghost, or a corporeal person? Not that we need to believe in ghosts to draw up this list. Jensen, who named his tale a “Fancy,” has, of course, found no occasion, as yet, to explain to us whether he wishes to leave us in our world, decried as dull and ruled by the laws of science, or to conduct us into another fantastic one, in which reality is ascribed to ghosts and spirits. As _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ show, we are ready to follow him into such a place without hesitation. The delusion of the imaginative archæologist would need, in that case, to be measured by another standard. Yes, when we consider how improbable must be the real existence of a person who faithfully reproduces in her appearance that antique bas-relief, our list shrinks to an alternative: hallucination or ghost of the noon hour. A slight touch in the description eliminates the former possibility. A large lizard lies stretched out, motionless, in the sunlight; it flees, however, before the approaching foot of Gradiva and wriggles away over the lava pavement. So, no hallucination; something outside of the mind of our dreamer. But ought the reality of a _rediviva_ to be able to disturb a lizard? Before the house of Meleager Gradiva disappears. We are not surprised that Norbert Hanold persists in his delusion that Pompeii has begun to live again about him in the noon hour of spirits, and that Gradiva has also returned to life and gone into the house where she lived before the fateful August day of the year 79. There dart through his mind keen conjectures about the personality of the owner, after whom the house may have been named, and about Gradiva’s relation to the latter; these show that his science has now given itself over completely to the service of his imagination. After entering this house, he again suddenly discovers the apparition, sitting on low steps between two yellow pillars. “Spread out on her knees lay something white, which he was unable to distinguish clearly; it seemed to be a papyrus sheet” (_G._ p. 55). Taking for granted his most recent suppositions about her ancestry, he speaks to her in Greek, awaiting timorously the determination of whether the power of speech may, perhaps, be granted to her in her phantom existence. As she does not answer, he changes the greeting to Latin. Then, from smiling lips, come the words, “If you wish to speak with me, you must do so in German.”