But those rooms I never occupied. Before they were ready I had left Paris again. This is the way it came about. I was unhappy—ever so unhappy. Homesickness, the bitterness of longing, the agony of separation, made me suffer as I had not thought that any one could suffer. Dispatches from Artur and letters from him and his sisters came speeding to me every day. The sisters wrote that no one would know Artur, that he never spoke, that he seemed to be suffering from melancholia. When I was alone all I could do was to weep or write home or groan with heartache. When I was with Alfred Nobel I was for the moment diverted, for he could chat and tell stories and philosophize so entertainingly that his conversation quite captivated the mind. To talk with him about the world and humanity, about art and life, about the problems of time and eternity, was an intense intellectual enjoyment. He kept aloof from social life: certain forms of shallowness, of falsity, of frivolity, filled him with wrath and disgust. He was full of faith in the abstract ideal of a coming loftier humanity,—“when once people come into the world with better-developed brains,”—but full of distrust of the majority of the men of his day, for he had had to make the acquaintance of so many low, selfish, insincere characters. He was distrustful also of himself, and bashful even to the point of timidity. He regarded himself as repulsive; believed that he was incapable of inspiring sympathetic feelings; was always afraid that people were merely flattering him because of his enormous wealth. That was doubtless the reason why he had never married. His studies, his books, his experiments,—those were what filled his life. He was also a writer and poet, but never published any of his poetical works. A philosophical poem a hundred pages long, written in the English language, he gave me to read in manuscript; I found it simply splendid. He must soon have discovered that I was burdened with a secret sorrow. “Are you fancy-free?” he asked me one day. “No,” I answered honestly. He pressed me further, and I told the whole story of my love and my renunciation. “You have acted bravely; but be completely courageous, break off the correspondence also—then let a little time pass ... a new life, new impressions—and you will both forget—he perhaps even sooner than you!” Break off the correspondence? I could not; it was my consolation. What was I to do in my lonely hours if I did not write to my dear one—tell him everything minutely, all my experiences and all my feelings? Alfred Nobel could give me only one or two hours a day, for he was tied to his work. He had another new invention in mind. “I wish I could produce a substance or a machine,” he said to me, “of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that wars should thereby become altogether impossible.”