And then comes the fear of making oneself ridiculous, and all the tame considerations that hamper every pure and fresh impulse. And all this, dear Fraulein, you and I have experienced. Our souls have met and recognised each other. This is a mighty fact, which you felt as well as I three days ago as your carriage crossed the Kurfürsten Bridge. If we were to meet now in society, the ordinary conventional preliminaries of getting acquainted would take away our naïve impression, we should be bereft of that elemental undeviating conviction which constituted the mysterious charm of our meeting. Let us then remain strangers to each other outwardly, trusting only to these first glowing intuitions. Let us exchange a few letters, freely and without a thought to conventionality. Their contents shall bind us to nothing in real life, and should we meet by some strange accident, they shall be but a memory. Do not, I beg of you, listen to the faint-hearted criticism of reason, but follow the first hearty impulse of your soul. It will lead you aright. With warm sympathy, THE UNKNOWN OF THE KURFÜRSTEN BRIDGE. III. DEAR SIR,--I have decided to answer your interesting letter. Frau von B. is to read all letters that pass between us, so that I can enter upon this correspondence with a happy sense of freedom from responsibility. I am weary of the dryness of ordinary intercourse, and there is nothing I should like better than to talk to a man for once without reserve. I drop my worsted-work as the prisoner drops his chains, and dip my pen into the ink with the thrilling rapture of dawning freedom. Do you know what it is to do worsted-work? Have you ever thought about this last reminiscence of mediæval times, this glaring anachronism in a time of steam and electricity and enlightenment?... Liberty flows and surges about us, and life brings forth thousands of rich blossoms, and we sit imprisoned and--do worsted-work, or drum on the piano, murdering Chopin, or if we are very clever, sing Schumann’s songs with the pathos of dilettantism. When I met you on the Kurfürsten Bridge, Frau von B. and I were just coming home from a ladies’ party, to which all the guests had brought their worsted-work. I had really suffered under the unendurable weight of conversation on topics of the utmost indifference, under a hypocritical interest in things which cannot possibly interest anybody. My heart was full of bitterness, and on the way home I was considering the question whether such a life was worth living, whether it would not be wiser to run away, to adopt the garb of a man, and try one’s powers boldly in the stream of life. At that moment I saw you, and I felt all that you speak of in your letter. In that short second in which our eyes met, pictures clearly defined and wondrously bright arose before me.