"There is one who will listen to this quietly and passively and will accept with a gracious smile at its end the congratulations of her women friends without having understood a word of it." Elizabeth, thus referred to, raised her head. She remembered this conversation, expressed somewhat disdainfully, but which had not been offensive. She had really understood only the pleasure of being on parade and well received. Being too indolent to think and form her own opinion, she agreed quite willingly with all the lecturers whom she heard. But not being informed, why should she be on her guard? And what did these allusions, these omissions signify? Still, she did not understand. What were her faults? What reproaches could he make her? She could not be appealed to by quotations, and generalities. Why not speak more frankly? She took up the note-book again more nervously, on the alert for the slightest vindication as a warned sentry watches for the approaching enemy who has been sighted. The continuation of the diary was dated from Saint Martin d'Uriage. When the summer came they left Paris. Albert, engaged in the writing of "The History of the Peasant," no longer needing to make a memorandum of other subjects, applied himself to analyzing his own mind. Whether he was growing accustomed to putting his sorrow into words, or whether that suffering, increasing, rendered him less self-possessed, at any rate, little by little, not without hesitation, however, he was losing that reserve which had kept him from revealing his inmost thoughts, and as a result of which he had thus far concealed them within his literary annotations or anonymous complaints: "August, 1903--'Nowadays the world is free to great souls. To those who are alone or to a couple, many places are open where one can breathe the fragrance of the silent water.' "Alone or a couple? Where did Nietzsche imbibe such confidence in love? If one wished to experience the living presence of his thought, he must find solitude. For our thought is jealous, restless and austere. We are alone in our deepest emotions. Art, nature, metaphysics and the past which is ours to explore, demand that we be alone to understand them. In marriage it is necessary to keep this solitude intact. One does not give his intellectual strength to the joint patrimony. The cleverness of the wife lies perhaps in respecting this, by keeping her distance. If she does not do so she lowers, weakens, and finally kills it. "Therefore, why this dream of an absolute intimacy, and why this melancholy, so poignant at certain times of not having realized it, when instead, we should rejoice in it?"