I now struggled with the exceedingly painful question whether Aniela did not belong to that kind of commonplace virtuous women, who want to keep their accounts in order, and reject love because it reaches above the ordinary standard of their hearts and minds. I searched in the past for proofs. "Who knows," I said to myself, "whether her simple ethical code is not resting upon such a foundation?" I had believed her to be one of those exceptional natures, different from all other women, inaccessible as the snowy heights of the Alps that without any slope soar straight heavenward. And now this lofty nature considers it the most proper thing that a husband in slippers should trample on those snows. What does it all mean? Whenever thoughts like these crowd my brain I feel as if I were on the brink of madness; such a rage seizes me that if I could I would throw down, trample, and spit upon the forces of life, reduce the whole world to chaos and obliterate its existence. On my journey back from Vienna I was searching for some unearthly abode where I might love Aniela even as Dante loved Beatrice. I built it of the sufferings from which as from fire my love had risen purified, of my renunciations and sacrifices, and thought that in a superhuman, simply angelic way she would be mine, and feel that she belonged to me. And now it came into my thoughts that it was not worth while to speak about it, as she would not understand me; not worth while leading her on to those heights, as she would not be able to breathe there. She might agree, in her soul, that I should go on loving her, go on suffering, since that flatters her vanity; but no compact, no union the most spiritual, no mutual belonging even in the Dantesque meaning,--to none of these will she agree, because she understands only one belonging and one right, which is expressed in a man's dressing-gown, and her soul cannot rise above the narrow, mean, matrimonial, book-keeping spirit.