I pondered all day on the painful dilemma in which I was placed; I dreamt of my Dulcinea every night, and began to look as exhausted as I felt. One day that I went to Fredensborg, in response to an invitation from Frederik Paludan-Müller, the poet said to me: "Have you been ill lately? You look so pale and shaken." I pretended not to care; whatever I said or did in company was incessant acting.
I experienced revulsions of feeling similar to those that troubled Don Quixote. Now I saw in my distant Spanish maiden the epitome of perfection, now the picture melted away altogether; even my affection for her then seemed small, artificial, whimsical, half-forgotten. And then again she represented supreme happiness.
When the decision came, when,--as everyone with the least experience of the world could have foretold,--all the beautiful dreams and audacious plans collapsed suddenly, I felt as though this long crisis had thrown me back indescribably; my intellectual development had been at a standstill for months. It was such a feeling as when the death of some loved person puts an end to the long, tormenting anxiety of the foregoing illness. I, who had centred everything round one thought, must now start joylessly along new paths. My outburst,--which astonished myself,--was:
"How I wanted a heart!"
V.
I could not at once feel it a relief that my fancies had all been dissipated into thin air. Physically I was much broken down, but, with my natural elasticity, quickly recovered. Yet in my relations towards the other sex I was torn as I had never been before. My soul, or more exactly, that part of my psychical life bordering on the other sex, was like a deep, unploughed field, waiting for seed.
It was not much more than a month before the field was sown. Amongst my Danish acquaintances there was only one, a young and very beautiful widow, upon whom, placed as I was with regard to Mile. Mathilde, I had definitely counted. I should have taken the young Spaniard to her; she alone would have understood her--they would have been friends.
There had for a long time been warm feelings of sympathy between her and me. It so chanced that she drew much closer to me immediately after the decisive word had been spoken. She became, consequently, the only one to whom I touched upon the wild fancies to which I had given myself up, and confided the dreams with which I had wasted my time. She listened to me sympathetically, no little amazed at my being so devoid of practical common sense. She stood with both feet on the earth; but she had one capacity that I had not met with before in any young woman--the capacity for enthusiasm. She had dark eyes, with something melancholy in their depths; but when she spoke of anything that roused her enthusiasm, her eyes shone like stars.
She pointed out how preposterous it was in me to wish to seek so far away a happiness that perhaps was very close to me, and how even more preposterous to neglect, as I had done, my studies and intellectual aims for a fantastic love. And for the first time in my life, a young woman spoke to me of my abilities and of the impression she had received of them, partly through the reading of the trifles that I had had printed, partly, and more particularly, through her long talks with me. Neither the little French girl nor the young Spanish lady had ever spoken to me of myself, my talents, or my future; this Danish woman declared that she knew me through and through. And the new thing about it all, the thing hitherto unparalleled in my experience, was that she believed in me. More than that: she had the highest possible conception of my abilities, asserted in contradiction to my own opinion, that I was already a man of unusual mark, and was ardently ambitious for me.
Just at this moment, when so profoundly disheartened, and when in idle hopes and plans I had lost sight of my higher goal, by her firm belief in me she imparted to me augmented self-respect. Her confidence in me gave me increasing confidence in myself, and a vehement gratitude awoke in me for the good she thus did me.