Our author has omitted to give the motive whence originates the repression of the erotic life in his hero; the latter’s interest in science is, of course, only the means of which the repression makes use; the physician would have to probe deeper here, perhaps in this case without finding the foundation. Probably, however, the author of _Gradiva_, as we have admiringly emphasized, has not hesitated to represent to us how the awakening of the repressed eroticism results from the very sphere of the means which are serving the repression. It is rightly an antique, the bas-relief of a woman, through which our archæologist is snatched and admonished out of his alienation from love to pay the debt with which we are charged by our birth. The first manifestations of the process now stimulated by the bas-relief are fancies which play with the person represented by it. The model appears to him to be something “of the present,” in the best sense, as if the artist had fixed the girl walking on the street from life. The name, Gradiva, which he forms from the epithet of the war-god advancing to battle, Mars Gradivus, he lends to the ancient girl; with more and more definitions he endows her with a personality. She may be the daughter of an esteemed man, perhaps of a patrician, who is associated with the temple service of a divinity; he believes that he reads Greek ancestry in her features, and finally this forces him to transport her far from the confusion of a metropolis to more peaceful Pompeii, where he has her walking over the lava stepping-stones which make possible the crossing of the street. These feats of fancy seem arbitrary enough and yet again harmlessly unsuspicious. Even when from them is produced, for the first time, the impulse to act, when the archæologist, oppressed by the problem whether such foot-position corresponds to reality, begins observations from life, in looking at the feet of contemporary women and girls, this act covers itself by conscious, scientific motives, as if all the interest in the bas-relief of Gradiva had originated in his professional interest in archæology. The women and girls on the street, whom he uses as objects for his investigation, must, of course, assume a different, coarsely erotic conception of his conduct, and we must admit that they are right. For us, there is no doubt that Hanold knows as little about his motives as about the origin of his fancies concerning Gradiva. These latter are, as we shall learn later, echoes of his memories of the beloved of his youth, remnants of these memories, transformations and disfigurements of them, after they have failed to push into consciousness in unchanged form. The so-called æsthetic judgment that the relief represents “something of the present” is substituted for the knowledge that such a gait belongs to a girl known to him and crossing streets _in the present_; behind the impression “from life” and the fancy about her Greek traits, is hidden the memory