At the age of twenty-four she formed a very strong attachment to Count Karl von Finckenstein, the son of a Prussian minister, a man a year younger than herself. They became engaged, and Rahel lived for some years solely for this love. Finckenstein was good-hearted, very much in love, and sincerely devoted to her, but his character was weak. He told her what he had to bear from his family, whose pride revolted against an alliance with a person of inferior position, and who were endeavouring to make him give her up. Rahel's pride was deeply wounded, and she gave him back his word. In character and intellect his superior, she could easily have vanquished his scruples if she had made up her mind to do so, but instead of this she set him free at once, and he was weak enough, attached though he was to her, to take the liberty she offered. She never overcame this first great humiliation. Three years passed, and she fell in love again, this time passionately, soul and senses, and the feeling was returned. Her second engagement was to Don Raphael Urquijo, a particularly attractive young attaché of the Spanish embassy in Berlin. The engagement lasted for a year. They were passionately attached to each other, but their characters were too unlike, he was too decidedly her inferior. He tormented and insulted her with his jealousy to such an extent that to preserve her self-respect she parted from him; but she did it with a feeling of crushing, maddening grief, a feeling of loneliness, of being left exposed to all the coldness of life without that shelter from it which she, with her woman's heart, could so ill dispense with. After Finckenstein's desertion, it had been proposed that she should make a _mariage de convenance_. Her answer was: "I cannot marry, for I cannot lie. Do not imagine that I am proud of myself for this; I cannot do it, just as I cannot play the flute.... He must have no prejudices, otherwise I could not stand it.... And he must not be stupid and compel me to lie and pretend that I admire him. I must be able to say exactly what I choose." For long the needs of her heart were only incompletely satisfied, and she applied herself all the more ardently to intellectual pursuits. It was a great hindrance to her that she had acquired so little knowledge. She herself talked about her dense ignorance. She was, of course, very far from being ignorant, but so much is certain, that she never acquired any real insight into what science is, and never thought a scientific thought.