Nothing very significant so far. Indeed, Anna would seem to be the very best example of the ordinary German maiden, ruthlessly exploring her own limited soul and dreaming of the moon. Then suddenly an event occurs which changes her crude immaturity into something more real. She comes across a man of about thirty, who smokes his cigar, as she herself says, "with elegant ease," and who discourses about many things--about intoxication, about remorse, about books, about art, and about her poems. Gradually the intimacy grows, and Anna's whole life, and even her literary style, becomes eloquent because the love of her life has dawned on her horizon. "By-and-by I began to think of him whether I saw him or not; his face, his figure, rose like a blazing question from the midst of the strange, wistful dreams that I had dreamt all my life, and something that had lain within me, dull and senseless like a trance, woke, wondered, and trembled into joy." She has now got something to occupy her mind apart from the analysis of her own soul. Her poems, naturally, become love poems. Her thoughts are no longer turned inward, but outward, craving for his presence and companionship. But the reader must not believe for a moment that he is going to peruse the ordinary love story. No, the nameless hero--a rather cryptic personage, suggesting now and again Manfred, certainly a little Byronic in his presentment, who calls himself "a wolf in sheep's clothing"--has no intention of making Anna either his mistress or his wife. It puzzles her a little what the man means, or what her life is henceforth to become. On one occasion she has a strange vision. She is in a graveyard at night-time. "And as I stood there staring into the darkness above and beyond the graves, I saw a vision--a circle of flames, growing into enormous size, embracing all the world except myself, leaving me outside and alone." Anna is like little Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," who stands desolate and alone in the springtime when all the animal creation with whom he had consorted so amicably are inspired by that passionate feeling which comes to them in the opening year, but which leaves the little human boy untouched and forlorn. Anna, too, has realized her loneliness. She is doomed to be the Eternal Virgin, the predestinate spinster. In a world in which the feminine race largely predominates there are not lovers and husbands enough to go round, and she must remain outside that charmed circle--the leaping flames of love and passion, which seem to embrace all the world except herself.