I stood under the tall trees, stunned and stupefied. I knew not whether I was more awake or more dreaming than ever. Softly the rain dripped from the branches. I went slowly through the garden, which stretched far along the river bank. At last I found Demian. He stood in an open summer house. Naked to the waist, he was doing boxing exercises with a little sack of sand hung from a beam. Astonished, I remained standing there. Demian looked magnificent; his broad chest, the firm manly head, the uplifted arms were strong and sturdy. The movements came from the hips, the shoulders, the joints of the arm, as easily as if they bubbled out of a spring of strength. “Demian!” I called. “What are you doing there?” He laughed gaily. “I am exercising. I have promised to box with the little Jap; the fellow is as agile as a cat, and naturally just as sly. But he won’t be able to manage me. I owe him just one little beating.” He drew on shirt and coat. “You have already seen mother?” he asked. “Yes, Demian, what a marvellous mother you have! Mother Eve! The name suits her perfectly; she is like the mother of all being.” He gazed for an instant musingly in my face. “You know her name already? You ought to be proud, young friend. You are the only one to whom she has said it in the first hour’s acquaintance.” From this day on I went in and out of the house like a son and a brother, but also like a lover. When I closed the gate behind me, even when I saw the tall trees of the garden emerge in the distance, I was happy. Outside was “reality,” outside were streets and houses, human beings and institutions, libraries and lecture rooms--here inside were love and the life of the soul, here was the kingdom of fairy stories and dreams. And yet we lived by no means shut off from the world. In thought and word we often lived in its midst, only on another plane. We were not separated from the majority of creatures by boundaries, but rather by a different sort of vision. Our task was to be, as it were, an island in the world, perhaps an example, in any case to proclaim that it was possible to live a different sort of life. I, who had been isolated for so long, learned to what extent community of feeling is possible between people who have experienced complete loneliness. I no longer desired to be back at the tables of the happy, at the feasts of the merry. I no longer felt envious or homesick when I saw others living in community. And slowly I was initiated into the mystery of those who bore “the sign.”