but a painful trial. Like everybody else, I refused to confess it (I
should not have confessed it even now but for the outcome). Now I am
astonished to think that I did not see my real situation. It was so easy
to perceive it, in view of those quarrels, begun for reasons so trivial
that afterwards one could not recall them.

"Just as it often happens among gay young people that, in the absence of
jokes, they laugh at their own laughter, so we found no reasons for our
hatred, and we hated each other because hatred was naturally boiling
up in us. More extraordinary still was the absence of causes for
reconciliation.

"Sometimes words, explanations, or even tears, but sometimes, I
remember, after insulting words, there tacitly followed embraces and
declarations. Abomination! Why is it that I did not then perceive this
baseness?"



CHAPTER XIII.

"All of us, men and women, are brought up in these aberrations of
feeling that we call love. I from childhood had prepared myself for this
thing, and I loved, and I loved during all my youth, and I was joyous in
loving. It had been put into my head that it was the noblest and highest
occupation in the world. But when this expected feeling came at last,
and I, a man, abandoned myself to it, the lie was pierced through and
through. Theoretically a lofty love is conceivable; practically it is
an ignoble and degrading thing, which it is equally disgusting to
talk about and to remember. It is not in vain that nature has made